Naga

Nagas are serpent beings of Indian tradition, a class rather than an individual, associated with water, with the subterranean realm called Patala, and with treasure, fertility and hidden knowledge; they can take human form and are ruled by kings such as Vasuki, Shesha and Takshaka. They are ambivalent rather than evil: they send the rains and guard wealth, but a broken taboo or an insult brings drought, snakebite or flood. Shesha (Ananta), the cosmic serpent of a thousand heads, supports the god Vishnu as he sleeps on the ocean between the ages, and serpent-worship (naga-puja) remains a living village practice across South Asia, with stone naga-images set beneath sacred trees and festivals such as Nag Panchami.

The Mahabharata supplies the fullest Puranic account of the nagas' origin and near-destruction: born as the many sons of the sage Kashyapa's wife Kadru, the serpents lost a wager with their co-wife Vinata (mother of Garuda) and were made her servants, a grievance that runs through their later enmity with Garuda's line. Generations on, King Janamejaya, avenging his father Parikshit's death by the naga Takshaka's bite, undertook the great snake-sacrifice, the sarpa satra, intended to exterminate the entire naga race by drawing them into a sacrificial fire; the rite was halted only when the sage Astika, himself of mixed naga and Brahmin descent, intervened and won its termination.

In Buddhism the naga is reinterpreted without being discarded. The serpent-king Mucalinda shelters the meditating Buddha from a storm by spreading his hood over him, one of the most widely represented scenes in Buddhist art. Nagas are said to guard scriptures until the world is ready for them, the philosopher Nagarjuna is traditionally said to have retrieved the Prajnaparamita sutras from their keeping, and they appear as protectors of the Dharma throughout Buddhist Asia. In Southeast Asia the naga fuses with local water-serpent belief to become a central architectural motif, guarding temple stairways and bridges from Cambodia to Thailand and Laos. The Chinese and Southeast Asian dragon was partly assimilated to the naga in Buddhist transmission, so that the same word is sometimes rendered "dragon", a translator's equivalence that blurs two distinct beings.

Southeast Asian temple architecture gives the naga its most monumental physical form: the causeways of Angkor Wat and other Khmer temples are flanked by long balustrades carved as the sinuous bodies of multi-hooded nagas, most often shown with seven heads fanned out like a crown, an image widely read as representing a rainbow bridge connecting the human world to the abode of the gods. Lao and Thai riverine tradition adds a further, more local layer again: the Mekong itself is popularly held to have been shaped by the passage of a great naga, and unexplained fireballs rising from the river's surface on certain nights are still popularly attributed to nagas living beneath it, a living folk belief rather than a textual doctrine.