On the serpent beings of springs and deep water, the one who sheltered the Buddha in a storm, and why the oldest fear we have keeps turning into reverence.
Before the thought comes, the body already knows. A curve in the grass, a movement at the edge of the path, and something in us goes still. Nobody has to teach a child to be wary of snakes. The fear arrives on its own, older than language, older than the name of anything.
And yet almost everywhere that fear lived, people also knelt. They carved the serpent over temple doors, set it coiled around the spring, painted it on the gate where the treasure was kept. In India, and across every land that Buddhism reached, that serpent has a name. It is the naga.
People of the water
The nagas are not simply snakes. In the old stories they are a people, with kings and queens, palaces beneath lakes and rivers, and treasuries that no human has seen. They can take the shape of a cobra or of a man or woman crowned with hoods. They are proud, easily wounded, long in memory. They hold the rain. When they are honoured the fields are green; when they are offended, the springs go bad and the sky stays shut.
That last idea travelled a long way. In Tibet the water spirits are called lu, and they are understood to live in springs, lakes, marshes and the roots of old trees. Many Tibetans will still tell you not to foul a spring, not to dig carelessly near water, not to cut the tree that stands over it. Certain illnesses, especially of the skin, have long been said to come from disturbing them. Small offerings are left for them, milk and grain and fragrant things, the way you would leave something at a neighbour's door after you had made too much noise.
We find something tender in this. It is an ecology written as courtesy. The water is not a resource. It is somebody's house.
Naga or dragon: what is the difference?
The naga comes from India: a serpent being, often a many-hooded cobra, living in water and under the earth. The Chinese long is a different creature. But when Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese, nāga was rendered as long, “dragon”, and the two have been tangled together ever since.
The king who became a roof
The most beautiful naga story in Buddhism is also one of the quietest. After his awakening, the Buddha sat for weeks in meditation beneath the trees near Bodh Gaya. In one of those weeks a great storm came and did not stop. For seven days the rain fell and the wind was cold.
The naga king Mucalinda, who lived in the lake nearby, rose out of the water. He wrapped his body seven times around the seated Buddha and opened his hood above his head like a parasol, so that no rain touched him. When the storm passed he unwound himself, took the form of a young man, and bowed.
Look for it in the art of Cambodia, Thailand and Sri Lanka and you will see the scene again and again: the Buddha seated on the coils, the hoods spread above him in a fan. The creature we are born afraid of, turned into shelter.
A library under the sea
There is another story, told about Nagarjuna, one of the great teachers of the Mahayana. It is said that the scriptures on the perfection of wisdom had been given to the nagas for safekeeping, because the human world was not yet ready for them. Nagarjuna went down into their realm and brought them back.
Whether one takes this as history or as a way of speaking, it says something true about how people felt: that the deepest things are kept somewhere cold and dark and guarded, and that it takes courage, and a certain kind of friendship with what we fear, to go and fetch them.
Garuda, the enemy
Every guardian needs an adversary, and the naga's is the Garuda. In the Indian epics their feud begins with two sisters, both wives of the same sage: Kadru, mother of the serpents, and Vinata, mother of Garuda. A wager over the colour of a horse's tail, a trick, a long servitude, and from then on the great bird and the serpents are enemies for good. Garuda eats snakes. In Tibet the khyung, Garuda's cousin, is called on to heal the illnesses the lu are said to cause.
It would be easy to read this as good against evil. We do not think that is quite right. The two belong to the same world, one of sky and one of water, and the pictures always show them together. You cannot tell the story of one without the other.
What we tried to carve
When we began the Mystical Serpent pieces, we did not want an animal. We wanted the moment when fear becomes reverence, which is the whole history of the naga in one gesture.
So the serpent on our pendant is coiled and settled, not striking. Its eye is a natural garnet. And in its jaws it carries not prey but a ruyi, the old sceptre of wishes granted, gilded in 24K gold by fire. On the cuff, carved silver waves curl over the body and every crest is touched with gold, because this is a creature of water first.
We will not tell you that wearing a serpent protects you, or brings rain, or anything of the kind. We do not know that, and we would distrust anyone who said they did. What we can say is that it is an old form, made slowly and with care, and that it carries a very human story: how we learned to bow to the thing we feared, and found that it had been guarding the water all along.
The serpent did not change. We did. We stopped running long enough to see it was coiled around the spring.
Mystical Serpent Naga Pendant · Mystical Serpent Cuff · Mystical Serpent Ring · The Mystical Serpent Collection · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry
More from the Journal: Garuda in Tibet: The Bird That Eats Poison · Kang Rinpoche, the Mountain We Are Named After