Naga- Buddhist RaceRace

Beneath the Waters

Their palaces lie at the bottom of oceans, lakes, and rivers, built from crystal and gold. In their own realm they take the form of great serpents with cobra hoods, sometimes bearing three heads, sometimes seven. Above water they can appear fully human or half-serpent at will. They live for ages, control the rains, and hoard treasures that no human hand has touched. The Naga Samyutta names four royal families ruling the naga world, all answering to Virupakkha, the Great King of the West, who governs them as part of the Four Great Kings beneath Tavatimsa heaven.

Pollute their waters and they send plague. Slight them and the rains stop. A naga's temper is legendary. The Vinaya records that a naga once disguised himself as a human and took ordination as a monk, only to be discovered when he fell asleep and reverted to serpent form. The Buddha barred nagas from the sangha after that, but gently: they could still keep the precepts as laypeople and earn a human birth next time.

Mucalinda's Shelter

Seven weeks after his enlightenment, the Buddha sat meditating at the foot of the Mucalinda tree when an unseasonal storm broke. Rain lashed the ground for seven days. The naga king Mucalinda rose from beneath the earth, coiled his body seven times around the Buddha, and spread his great hood overhead like a canopy. The Buddha did not stir. When the storm cleared and Mucalinda unwound himself, he took human form and stood before the Buddha with his palms pressed together. At the birth itself, according to the Lalitavistara, the naga brothers Nanda and Upananda poured streams of warm and cool water from the sky to bathe the newborn prince.

Keepers of Hidden Scriptures

When the Buddha taught the Prajnaparamita sutras, the Perfection of Wisdom, humanity was not ready to receive them. The nagas took the texts down to their underwater realm and kept them for centuries. The philosopher Nagarjuna, whose very name honors the serpent beings, descended to retrieve the scriptures and brought them to the surface world. The Lotus Sutra records a still stranger episode. The eight-year-old daughter of the Naga King Sagara appeared before the assembly, offered a jewel to the Buddha, and in the time it took the jewel to leave her hand, achieved complete and perfect enlightenment. She became a buddha on the spot. The assembled monks and bodhisattvas, who had just been told that female and nonhuman beings could not attain buddhahood, watched it happen.

The Garuda War

The garudas, golden eagle-beings of enormous size, hunt nagas as their natural prey. They swoop down to the water's edge, beat back the waves with their wings, and snatch the serpents from the shallows. The nagas cannot match them in open air. In the Jataka tales, the Buddha once intervened in this ancient war. He gave the nagas a thread from his robe: any naga wearing it could not be seized. The garudas, finding their prey untouchable, came to the Buddha in fury. He brokered terms between the two races. The garudas would receive food offerings from human devotees instead of hunting live nagas, and both sides would keep the peace under the Dharma.