Reading the Mahāvaṃsa: The Literary Aims of a Theravāda Buddhist History

WHY NĀGAS? Just as the conception of the other gives rise to a deepened awareness of self, the understanding of the nāga in the Mahāvaṃsa urges the reader to assume a certain understanding of himself or herself. The sense of self that is derived from reading this narrative peppered with nāgas is a temporally bounded one and ultimately provokes the reader into realizing his or her own immediate and urgent responsibility and agency toward his or her own moral development. As we saw in chapter 1, the proems of the two vaṃsas I focus on enunciate the reader’s work in urgent, vocative tones (suṇātha me, “Listen up!”) and press the reader toward a particular goal—namely, the cultivation of the requisite attitudes or emotions of saṃvega and pasāda. And as shown in chapter 2, literary devices work on the primed reader to effect transformation. The sense of self is thus dependent on the reader’s agency and interest in and ability to cultivate such emotions in the here and now.

A sense of self is honed as it comes into juxtaposition with the narrative character of the nāga, whom the reader understands to be simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate—the nāgas are in a special, proximate relationship with the Buddha, even after his parinibbāṇa via his relics; but their spurious ontological nature and soteriological aptitude prohibits them from achieving the spiritual attainments that are possible for the text’s human audience. It is through this awareness of otherness vis-à-vis the character of the nāga that the hearer-reader recognizes the rather urgent responsibilities of a human birth. This recognition is made possible by the sympathetic and empathetic imaginative modes that are engendered through the nāga stories.

The ideal reader-hearer of the Mahāvaṃsa (who has embraced the reading instructions given in the proem and recognized the role that the language of light has in effecting a transformation of the landscape both inside and outside the text) understands characters such as the nāgas in a different light. How do figures as seemingly low and innocuous as the ubiquitous nāgas, a fixture of the Indic landscape, function within this text to help drive home the desired emotional reactions and spur practical effects for the reader?

The significant role of nāgas in the Buddhist vaṃsas has largely been ignored or glossed over as a mythical or whimsical accretion to these otherwise trustworthy historical documents. Robert DeCaroli writes, “In the case of the Buddhist literature, the yakṣas, nāgas, and other beings more often than not serve as little more than narrative hooks that provide an opportunity for an explication of doctrine.”¹ I strongly disagree with the characterization of nāgas as mere “narrative hooks” simply to grab the reader’s attention. Rather, I argue that they stimulate actual ethical work on the reader’s part; they are an intentionally employed trope to provoke the reader-hearer’s imagination, a requisite practice in the cultivation of the very values² that are frequently extolled in Buddhist stories. As Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen put it, “Far from being a cynical strategy to hold the attention of ‘the popular mind,’ the use of animal stories among Buddhists appears to be a sophisticated imaginative practice.”³ The nāga stories are fundamental to the functioning of the Mahāvaṃsa as a catalyst for emotional states conducive to the devoted practice of “good people” and nāgas are the rhetorical element that drives the narrative of the arrival, establishment, and proper veneration of the relics—which serve as the culmination of the Mahāvaṃsa’s narrative.

Joseph Walser has considered plausible reading methods to apply to the more legendary or mythological aspects of Buddhist texts that may be fruitfully applied in an encounter with the nāga in the vaṃsas. In considering the best reading strategies for the copious legends surrounding the “historical” Mahāyāna character Nagārjuna, he suggests: “In order to interpret these legends, the most productive position is to assume that all pieces of information in the legends were included for a reason. The purposive element will be stronger for those elements of the story that occupy a prominent place in the narrative. For those who are uncomfortable with the ‘intentional fallacy,’ I will say merely that we must impute a purposefulness or a strategy to the text in order to interpret it in its historical context.”⁴ To interpret the Mahāvaṃsa, we cannot ignore the serpentine creatures that inhabit Laṅkā at the time of the Buddha and that respond to his presence with a radical shift in their behavior. What might the narrative of the nāgas’ visceral experience of saṃvega and pasāda as provoked by the presence of the Buddha do in turn for the reader-hearer, whose objective is to experience those same emotional qualities? I contend that the presence of the nāgas is a part of the compiler’s literary strategy to bring about the emotions called for in the Mahāvaṃsa’s proem.

Walser also offers some specific reading strategies to be able to pick out the reason for the incorporation of legendary materials into texts. He writes that, generally speaking, “hagiographers compose their stories with two purposes in mind, spiritual edification and institutional legitimation.” Stories composed with the former purpose are easier to perceive as such because they “tend to echo or illustrate themes found in scripture, such as acts of altruism.”⁵ I would add that they are especially likely to be perceived and analyzed by the historian of religion, who is acutely attuned to anything smacking of religious or spiritual edification. In the case of the Mahāvaṃsa, the text is not squarely classified as a “religious” one, even though it was likely compiled by a monk (or monks) for other monks and was preserved by the monastic Mahāvihāra textual community until scholars became interested in it. In chapter 5, I consider how the earliest (Western) scholars and interpreters were interested primarily in the translated version of the Mahāvaṃsa and how they were followed by scholars and interpreters focusing on the historical veracity of this unprecedented (in South Asia) resource chronicle. The Mahāvaṃsa was thus ushered into the interpretive purviews of several disciplines in the social sciences, most especially history and anthropology. The elements that contribute to institutional legitimation have already undergone extensive scholarly scrutiny; as the vaṃsas are encountered by scholars of religion, however, religious themes such as conversion and relic worship reorient the predominant reading. The reading given in this book builds on this accretion of religious readings and pays attention to the literary elements that make such a reading not facile but more productive.

Walser places the “elements…of institutional legitimation” into two categories. First, the protagonist is juxtaposed to “a person, place, or theme that is independently famous.”⁶ This is obviously the case in the Mahāvaṃsa, where the legitimating proximity to the Buddha takes center stage at the outset. The second category of institutional legitimation that Walser identifies is a bit more complicated; it is when the protagonist’s fame and import is such that he then infuses places, people, and even events with legitimacy. In the case of Nāgārjuna, for instance, “once Nāgārjuna became famous, his association with pilgrimage sites lent an air of legitimacy (and antiquity) to those sites.”⁷ Even a cursory reading of the Mahāvaṃsa would suggest it is the Buddha who infuses Laṅkā with his authoritative presence. But I wonder if we can say that the nāgas themselves—who are created as model Buddhists at the outset of the text, striving for access to the Buddha and his teachings—are legitimized as carriers of the tradition’s concerns? Does their indigenous presence on the island, which is poetically established prior to the Buddha’s own visit, signify a special antiquity or legitimacy to the island itself, perhaps to indicate an a priori readiness of the island as a proper and fitting receptacle for the dhamma and sāsana? This reading might explain why their conversion story dominates the very first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa. The prominence of the nāgas demands our attention both for the spiritually edifying reasons they crop up in this privileged position and for the two-way movement of legitimating influence they extend to (and from) the Buddha to (and from) the island of Laṅkā.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s apposite maxim that animals (“natural species”) are “good to think” comes to mind in this context.⁸ We might say that nāgas were good to think for the literary cultures that employed them in fourth- and fifth-century Sri Lanka and that they continue to be good to think now in terms of our modern understanding of how nonhuman, animal agents function in religious texts. The textual community receiving the Mahāvaṃsa is primed through the Mahāvaṃsa to expect and develop a heightened emotional response to it, which in turn creates the ethical behaviors fitting for a community of “good people.” Nāgas are a good character to think with, to help individual hearers and readers navigate and work through this text, because of their radical transformation from selfish, bellicose creatures to model, devoted, relic-worshipping Buddhists.

Considering the ontological status, soteriological aptitude, and moral didacticism of nāgas as narrative characters in Pāli literature moves a reader. The use of nāgas is extensive in all genres of Pāli literature, often appearing in didactically and practically important stories at critical junctures. Indeed, nāgas were an accepted and effective trope in the Pāli Buddhist “tropics of discourse.”⁹ Here I focus primarily on their use in the opening story of the Mahāvaṃsa and in one particularly salient Jātaka tale.¹⁰ Becoming aware of the ontological status and soteriological aptitude of nāgas helps interpreters of the Mahāvaṃsa understand the nāgas’ role in conveying ethical lessons for the hearers-readers. Understanding the work nāgas elicit from readers-hearers is, in turn, critical for our understanding of the Mahāvaṃsa as a piece of multivalent transformative literature rather than singularly as a historical chronicle. It is crucial that we think through the fertile cultural sphere reflected in early Sri Lankan Pāli Buddhist chronicles, where in some cases nāgas have significant relationships with the Buddha (both as a live teacher and through his post-parinibbāṇa relics) and in other cases the bodhisatta has taken nāga form on his way to buddhahood.

A particularly salient Jātaka, the Bhūridatta Jātaka, and the opening chapter of the Pāli Mahāvaṃsa read together can help flesh out the meaning of the character of the nāga for fifth-century interpreters. Stylistically, the Jātakas share an element of narrativity with the Mahāvaṃsa (both are good stories). There is also a didactic dimension to the Bhūridatta Jātaka, and it exhibits a more transparent moral dimension than the Mahāvaṃsa’s first chapter (especially when it is read without the benefit of the proem). Finally, the Jātakas overtly appeal to the legitimizing presence of the Buddha, who is both the narrator and the protagonist. In terms of content, both stories are about the interstices of time and ethics. The Jātakas are iterations of the extensive former lives of the Buddha and tell vignettes that illustrate his cultivation of pāramitā (the perfections), so the fact that he took a nāga birth on his journey to Buddhahood is significant. Vaṃsas are also unequivocally about the passage of time, spanning from the nāgas’ inhabitation of early Laṅkā to their holding on to the cache of Buddha relics for future use to the nāgarāja (nāga king) named Kāla (Time). It is reasonable to assume that the Bhūridatta Jātaka and the Mahāvaṃsa might have been encountered on similar terms within a monastic setting; a member of the textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa would likely have a general and practical familiarity with both episodes. Also, I argue that these stories, taken together, flesh out the creativity of the articulation of a particular, ethically imbued worldview or “world wish” that can be understood in distinctly religious rather than primarily political terms.

The Jātakas, contained as they are in the Khuddaka Nikāya, were among the “open” texts that different textual communities would read and interpret according to their individual concerns. The Pāli Jātaka collection as we have received it is the result of the Mahāvihāra’s legacy of textual practices; according to tradition, it had been recorded, preserved, and passed down within the same textual community that was purportedly responsible for the Mahāvaṃsa. Walters notes: “My own work on the Pāli Vaṃsas makes it clear that these ‘open’ divisions of the canon became key sites for the disputes of ‘medieval’ Indian Buddhists. The ‘miscellaneous’ literature included all the elements that in their various ways constituted the ‘philosophies of history’ of the various orders, that is, their own versions of the Jātakas, narratives about the successions of the Buddha’s lives and Apadāna/Avadāna, stories about the nature of the cosmic polity he instituted.”¹² It is productive for us to see these open sites as negotiating a vast network of literary images, tropes, techniques, and expectations and to examine how these texts deliver their message. It is helpful to pair an “open site” such as the Bhūridatta Jātaka with the story of the Buddha’s initial impact on the nāgas of Laṅkā in the Mahāvaṃsa.

Variations, retellings, and commentaries on Jātaka stories abound in the Pāli tradition, indicating their openness. Different monastic orders maintained their own versions of the Jātakas, each version with a slightly (or vastly) different ordering of the stories. The depiction of the nāgas in each version is, by extension, similarly diverse. Fascination with and proliferation of Jātaka tales in art and architecture survive even today. Individual Jātaka tales occur in the Sutta and Vinaya Piṭakas, which compose the core of the Buddhist canon.¹³ Abbreviated versions of the stories and commentaries about the nāgas Bhūridatta, Campeyya, and Śaṅkhapāla also make a canonical appearance in the Cariyāpiṭaka of the Khuddaka Nikāya. The Cariyāpiṭaka includes thirty-five stories grouped together as illustrative of various perfections (pāramitā), with most focused on dāna pāramitā (perfection of generosity), sīla pāramitā (perfection of morality), and nekkhamma pāramitā (perfection of renunciation). All three stories of the bodhisatta’s nāga births are classified as stories about sīla pāramitā.¹⁴

The pre-Buddha is born as a nāga only three times in the Jātakas, although nāgas are involved in several of the stories as subordinate characters. In Viggo Fausbøll’s seminal edition of the Pāli Jātakas, the Bhūridatta Jātaka is number 543 of the 547 Pāli Jātakas, a placement that takes on significance when one considers that the nipāta (books) of the Jātakas are arranged according to the number of gāthā (verses) within each story.¹⁵ The final nipāta contains the longest, most substantial Jātaka stories, and this is where we find Bhūridatta Jātaka, the third longest in the entire collection and only a few removed from Vessantara, the story of the penultimate birth of the bodhisatta and arguably the most significant and popular Jātaka. The frame story for the Bhūridatta Jātaka, recounting the reason given for the Buddha to have the opportunity to tell the story of his former birth, is of the Buddha at Sāvatthi preaching a discourse to upāsaka (laity) on the importance of keeping the fast day. The moral of the story is that one should strive to vigilantly uphold one’s precepts and practice (especially because one is lucky to have been born a human). The Buddha then illustrates his lesson on sīla (morality) and perseverance with the story of his former birth as the nāga Bhūridatta.

The frame story here works like the proem of the Mahāvaṃsa insofar as it renders transparent the didactic aims of the story that is about to be told. Where the Mahāvaṃsa tells the story of the coming of the Buddha and his relics to cultivate emotions in the hearts of an ideal audience, the purpose of the Jātaka is the opportunity to remind the upāsaka to be vigilant and to practice correctly. In both texts, the presence of the Buddha lends even more legitimacy to the importance of the lesson to be conveyed. And in both stories the nāgas are the crucial agents who effect these perceptible changes in the audience.

In the particular Jātaka story I have selected, the bodhisatta actually takes birth as a nāga while perfecting himself on the long path to eventual buddhahood. Several Jātakas incorporate nāgas in their narrative, sometimes as prominent agents in the story, but, as noted earlier, the bodhisatta is born a nāga only three times in the Jātakas, as the nāgas Campeyya and Śaṅkhapāla as well as the nāga Bhūridatta. My reason for choosing the Bhūridatta story over the other two is simple: it is the longest and most layered and developed of the three accounts. The Campeyya narrative recounts an almost identical, although pared-down, tale, with a nāga aspiring to shed his nāga existence by practicing austerities and vows on an anthill in the realm of humans. Campeyya, like Bhūridatta, was enticed to the human realm as the only place to practice purity and self-control, requisite aspects of the sīla pāramitā (perfection of morality) that would ensure his progress on the path toward nibbāṇa. Śaṅkhapāla’s story is rather brief; we see a nāgarāja again observing austerities in the realm of humans, and he is beaten by a band of villagers (which is fine with him—to die, especially while observing moral practices, would bring him to a better birth). A sympathetic passerby saves him and then joins him for a while in the nāgaloka (subterranean nāga world)¹⁶ as a cherished guest before returning to be a storytelling ascetic. The Śaṅkhapāla Jātaka does not have an obvious underlying moral lesson.

I have selected the story of Bhūridatta here because I want to figure out just what a nāga birth entails,¹⁷ so that when we see the nāgas of Sri Lanka encountering (and being converted by) the Buddha, as recounted in the Mahāvaṃsa, we can have some prefatory understanding of what is at stake for people hearing and participating in the text and what the ethical implications of these characters or lessons might be. What are the implications for imagining the bodhisatta near buddhahood taking a nāga birth? If we understand what it may have meant for the writers and hearers-readers of the Mahāvaṃsa to imagine the bodhisatta undergoing a nāga birth in a well-known Jātaka tale, we will be better prepared to reflect on the work that nāgas in the Mahāvaṃsa elicited from fifth-century hearers-readers.

The Bhūridatta story invokes the power of familial love. It begins with the marriage between the prince of Benares and a nagīnī (female nāga) and moves through the marriage of their daughter Samuddajā¹⁸ to the nāgarāja Dhatarāṭṭha and on into the lives of their four sons, who are described as being “of watery nature.”¹⁹ The hero of the story is the second of Samuddajā’s sons, Bhūridatta, who is in fact the bodhisatta himself taking a nāga birth in his cultivation of the pāramitā (perfection) of sīla (morality).

Bhūridatta vows to observe a fast each night in the human realm, where this practice will cultivate great religious consequence (merit).²⁰ Bhūridatta is a large, supernatural snake being; he must transform into the more naturalistic cobra for his temporary ascetic practices in the human realm. Every evening he assumes the form of a giant snake and lies on top of an anthill, the natural abode of great snakes. Each morning as he transforms back into a heavenly body, nāga maidens serenade and ornament him and accompany him back to the nāgaloka.²¹

After some time, Bhūridatta is discovered by a Brahmin hunter, who asks him what kind of being he is: A sakka (god), a yakkha, or a nāga?²² He is in the midst of observing the fast, so he is compelled to tell the truth because to lie while cultivating morality, even to save your life, is anathema.²³ He invites this Brahmin together with the Brahmin’s son to the nāgaloka, where they live happily and lavishly for a year until they grow restless and leave. Bhūridatta gives them a special protective jewel (as we will see in the next chapter, nāgas are hoarders of such valuables), but when the two men stop and strip to take a bath on their way home, the jewel sinks into the earth and returns to the nāgas’ abode.²⁴

Later, a group of nāgas who are carrying that same jewel in the human world are frightened into dropping the jewel by the Brahmin Alambāyana’s anti-nāga spell, and Alambāyana attains possession of it. Alambāyana is a forest hermit who learned this special spell from the head ascetic at a forest ashram to frighten nāgas and bring forth wealth. The head ascetic had learned it directly from the garuḍa, an eaglelike natural enemy of the nāgas whom we will meet again later in the story. The Brahmin who had been a houseguest of the nāgarāja immediately sees the jewel and recognizes it as having been the gift from the nāgarāja given to him and his son as they left the nāgaloka. He tries to convince Alambāyana to give it back to him and finally succeeds when he agrees to show Alambāyana the place where the nāgarāja comes nightly to observe his fasting precept. (The Brahmin’s son, by the way, is so disgusted by his father’s duplicitous and morally reprehensible actions that he runs off to be an ascetic in the Himālayas.)

Betrayed by his Brahmin friend, Bhūridatta allows Alambāyana to capture him; he knows he cannot fight back or show anger toward Alambāyana while he is observing his fast, or his own moral character would be compromised. As Alambāyana tosses the jewel to the Brahmin as a reward, it falls to the ground and is once again swallowed up by the earth and transported back to the nāgaloka. The Brahmin is left with nothing. Meanwhile, Alambāyana chews special herbs, utters his spell, and then pounds the nāgarāja Bhūridatta into submission (although it is gratuitous for him to demonstrate such violence toward the snake because Bhūridatta has accepted his fate and does nothing to protest or defend himself). Alambāyana then puts Bhūridatta to work performing as a captive snake for the entertainment of crowds for some time, although Bhūridatta continues to observe his fast, eschewing any food offered to him for “fear of not being released from his captivity.”²⁵ The snake charmer plans a special performance for the king of Benares (who is, in fact, Bhūridatta’s own uncle, unbeknownst to everyone present).

Meanwhile, at the same time Bhūridatta is abducted, his mother has a dream foretelling her son’s capture.²⁶ After waiting yet another month for her absent son to return home (he is the most dependable of all her sons, the most regular of her visitors), she breaks down, cries, and convinces her eldest son, Sudassana, that something wicked has befallen Bhūridatta. Sudassana enlists the help of his two other brothers, and each proceeds to a different world. Sudassana takes the appearance of an ascetic, and when his sister Accimukhī insists on accompanying him, she takes the form of a frog that hides in the ascetic’s hair. They travel to the human world, see Bhūridatta’s blood on the anthill where he had been fasting, and follow the trail of blood, asking people along the way about the snake charmer’s whereabouts. The two enter the palace just as the snake show is beginning. The snake charmer lets Bhūridatta out of his basket to survey the crowd. Bhūridatta immediately spots his brother (nāgas can see through disguises): “The Great Being [bodhisatta], as he looked, beheld his brother in another part of the crowd, and, repressing the tears which filled his eyes, he came out of the basket and went up to his brother. The crowd, seeing him approach, retreated in fear and Sudassana was left alone; so he [the Great Being] went up to him and laid his head upon his foot and wept; and Sudassana also wept. The Great Being at last stopped weeping and went into the basket.”²⁷

The snake charmer is nervous because from the tears he assumes Sudassana has been bitten. But Sudassana proclaims that in fact the snake is harmless and cannot bite. The snake charmer is offended at Sudassana’s assertion that he has been cajoling his audiences with a less-than-fierce specimen and accepts a wager to see who is more powerful. Sudassana calls forth from his matted hair his sister in frog form, and she deposits an extraordinarily virulent poison into his hand. He then announces that there is no safe receptacle for it and that it will destroy the land, the sky, the water, even the entire earth upon contact. Only a ritual disposal of it into three specially dug holes—one filled with herbs, one with cow dung, and one with “heavenly medicines”—will suffice. When the poison is placed in the middle hole, a fire erupts, turning Alambāyana into a leper. Terrified, he agrees to set the nāga Bhūridatta free (who only then assumes a nonsnake form!). Sudassana then reveals to the king of Benares that the king is in fact their mother’s brother, hence their uncle, which sets up the penultimate chapter of the text, a massive family reunion that I will not recount here.

In the final chapter, another brother comes across the Brahmin who had initially betrayed Bhūridatta. The brother is about to kill him out of revenge but then decides instead to bring the Brahmin to the nāgaloka to see what the other brothers would recommend. This narrative twist allows for an extensive discourse on the folly of sacrificial Brahmins, the impotency of Vedic ritual practices, and the alternative Buddhist emphasis on the primacy of the dhamma, especially right practice (following the precepts and observing fast days, as Bhūridatta does), over Brahminical rites.²⁸

The centrality of nāga characters in the Bhūridatta Jātaka and especially the bodhisatta’s birth as a nāga to attain the perfection of morality (sīla pāramitā), when he is so close to completing the cultivation of the ten perfections, demand our attention. The Bhūridatta Jātaka’s frame story depicts the Buddha teaching laity about perseverance in upholding precepts and practice. The Buddha then illustrates his lesson with the story of his former birth as the nāga Bhūridatta.

Perhaps the frame story works in a similar way as the proem of the Mahāvaṃsa insofar as it renders transparent the didactic aims of the story that it is about to tell. Where the Mahāvaṃsa tells the story of the coming of the Buddha and his relics for the cultivation of emotions (agitation and satisfaction) in the hearts of an ideal audience, this Jātaka introduces the premise for the storytelling as an opportunity to remind the upāsaka (laity) audience to be vigilant and to practice correctly. Setting it in the voice of the Buddha lends even more legitimacy to the importance of the lesson to be conveyed. As a didactic text, the Jātaka provides a useful mechanism by which avid lay practice could be maintained because it was in the best interest of the saṅgha (monastic community) to develop a strong and supportive laity. Likewise, the imperative of the Mahāvaṃsa is to initiate or bolster requisite emotional attitudes that engender the proper practice (namely, relic veneration). In both stories reviewed here, the nāgas are crucial agents in effecting perceptible change in the audience.

Shifting our focus from the metaphor of light explored in chapter 2 to the character for whom that light was powerfully persuasive and transformative, we have to ask, What has the light of the dhamma exposed about the prominence of the nāga within the narrative? As we have seen, the Mahāvaṃsa begins with a story of nāgas. What is this nāga story doing at the very outset of a text frequently characterized as “a mythicized history (or [H]eilsgeschichte) of Buddhism in India and Sri Lanka”?²⁹ What does it mean for a text that imagines itself to be participating in a translocal Buddhist holy history, linking this Heilsgeschichte to the local reigns and accomplishments of Buddhist kings, to begin with nāgas? It seems particularly significant that the Mahāvaṃsa opens with a nāga story of monumental importance situated in the Buddha’s lifetime. He converts the nāgas by inculcating fear and then satisfaction, but he dismisses the yakkhas entirely. What, then, is the relationship between the Buddha and the nāgas, and what does this relationship convey to the reader about the nāgas’ ontological status and soteriological capacity? Most importantly, what does this special relationship between the Buddha and the nāgas do for the reader-interpreter? Now that we are familiar with the Bhūridatta Jātaka and the nāgas in the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, we can more closely examine the ontological status, soteriological aptitude, and moral didacticism of nāgas as particularly salient literary features.

The nāgas in the Mahāvaṃsa and the Bhūridatta Jātaka are obviously related. They all are nāgas, which are special snakes and classed as bhūta devatā (divine beings),³⁰ distinguished from sappas (Sanskrit, sarpas), or common snakes. The narrative function of nāgas undergoes a subtle shift between the Mahāvaṃsa and the Bhūridatta Jātaka. In the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, the Buddha himself comes in contact with the nāgas and actually forms relationships with them, individually (such as with Maṇiakkhika, who invites him back to the island for his third visit) and collectively (the Buddha converts multitudes of nāgas—eighty koṭis, an unthinkably high number—en masse upon his arrival to Sri Lanka). Bhūridatta, in contrast, is the Buddha-to-be, albeit in a previous life. Elsewhere in the Mahāvaṃsa, stories of the nāgas entail conversions by theras (monks) in borderlands, the introduction of the dhamma to new territory, and relationships with the relics of the dead and departed Buddha initiated and sustained by the nāgas. These stories stress both the expansionist strategies of the sāsana and the sustained relationship between the Buddha and this particularly slippery category of being.

In contrast, in the Jātakas we find a plethora of both common snakes (sarpas) and majestic nāgas who ultimately are interpreted in relation to the Buddha (as the Buddha himself puts it when he explains who is who at the conclusion of each Jātaka). The Buddha himself takes a nāga birth three times, so it is clear that such a low and detestable birth as that of a nāga does not prevent someone destined to become a buddha from attaining his goal but in fact helps him along. So why might the Buddha have taken a nāga birth? Was there something peculiar to this kind of existence that primed him for buddhahood in a unique way?³¹

Although both of our sources are saturated with clues as to the embodied nature of the nāgas, such as references to their abodes, habits, and practices, it is still relatively unclear what exactly they are. The word nāga is imprecisely translated into English by a variety of suggestive concepts: “snake,” “snake being,” “serpent,” even “dragon.” Stepping back from these two texts to consider the nature of nāgas in the broader Indic context, I am struck that we do not see other animals or gods or beings with a defined snakelike form such as that found in Sri Lankan Buddhist texts. Gaṇeśa may have an elephant head, but he does not have an explicitly elephant nature—he has a new head out of necessity, and it is an elephant’s head because of happenstance. Yakkhas, apsaras (beautiful, supernatural, nymphlike female beings), asuras (power-hungry, morally neutral, but more often than not challenging subdeities), and devas (deities) are all cosmological, ontological categories, but none of these “births” is described with reference to a particular natural, animal form. So are nāgas naturalistic animals or supernatural beings or even a group of humans who have assumed such lore and characteristics through years of being defined as the “other”?

As for the ontology of the nāga, the fifth-century virtuoso translator and commentary producer Buddhaghosa includes nāgas in the animal realm: “the animal generation is indicated by the mention of states of loss; for the animal generation is a state of loss because it is removed from the happy destiny; but it is not an unhappy destiny because it allows the existence of royal nāgas (serpents), who are greatly honoured.”³² At least by the fifth century, in Sri Lankan commentarial literature nāgas are squarely located in the animal realm, although it is not as bad a birth as that of other animals; one might be fortunate enough to be a nāgarāja and thus have a very comfortable and rich life.

Within the Theravāda tradition, that nāgas might be considered animals and not just animal-like is significant on many levels. Animals are sentient beings, viable agents in the ever-operative, world-ordering karmic drama; they are able to be saved by a good-intentioned bodhisatta or, in fact, be that bodhisatta. But animals are not humans and can therefore be used in allegorical ways in the literature. Nāgas benefit from a familiarity factor: people in early India and Sri Lanka regularly saw snakes, so it is no wonder that snakes loomed large in the literary imagination. The nāga is envisioned to be a sort of supersnake, with all the attributes of common snakes plus superpowers such as the ability to shape-shift and to kill by a mere glance or puff of poison breath. There may be some basis in nature (natural snakes) for the particular powers a nāga is assumed to hold. For instance, watching a snake glide effortlessly across the ground, disappearing through small cracks in the earth, one might be inclined to imagine some shape-shifting capacity as well as a subterranean home (nāgaloka). Likewise, snakebites can be poisonous, so it is easy to imagine why a nāga’s breath would be considered particularly virulent.

On a cosmic scale, it is good that classifying nonnatural animals is so difficult because it reminds humans that categories are permeable even within their lifetime (one’s neighbor might be a nāga), let alone through the course of several lifetimes. The relationship between humans and animals becomes more significant when viewed from a karmic, longue durée perspective.³³ An animal is never simply just an animal; an animal might have been one’s mother in a past incarnation—what Christopher Chapple has referred to as “an ever-changing game of cosmic musical chairs.”³⁴ The nāga, therefore, has a particular valence as a “ruminative trigger” for compassion because one’s own mother, daughter, father, or son or even oneself could have been a nāga in a past life.

Thinking about how other characters within the stories view animals, especially the nāgas, may help to define the nature of the nāga for interpreters outside the text. Chapple writes that “animals in the Jātaka tales are seen not so much as animals but as potential humans or as animals that can teach humans a lesson.”³⁵ We must also consider the added dimension that the “main animal” in the Bhūridatta Jātaka is none other than the bodhisatta himself, the ultimate teacher, and that he is in fact the narrator of the story as well. Philip Kapleau makes an excellent point about the underlying karmic system when he says that “the Buddha himself, narrator of these tales, regarded his own animal incarnations as no less meaningful than his human ones.”³⁶ This sentiment directly problematizes the widely held perception ingrained in the karma system that an animal birth is to be detested. It is true that Bhūridatta (as well as other nāgas throughout the Jātakas) strives to overcome his animal nature, observing rigorous practices to cultivate merit for a better rebirth, yet the Buddha, recalling his past lives, does so with respect for this station of birth.

DeCaroli writes, “The difficulty of the authors in finding a consistent framework within which to locate these spirit-deities is a testament to the mercurial and often contradictory natures of these illusive beings.”³⁷ Nāgas, though, are always nāgas in form and function, even when they are shape-shifting; serpent beings thus seem to be of a different sort of being than the yakkhas, guhyakas (attendants of Kubera, deity of wealth), gandhabbas (typically flying musician deities), and so on, who do not have a more stable, recognizable ontological status, stylized depiction, or naturalistic animal connection. Nāgas even have their own articulated nāgaloka, with its capital Poṭala. Of course, they are variously represented as fully snake, partially snake, or even an entirely other sort of being altogether when in their shape-shifting modes—for example, Bhūridatta’s sister Accimukhī, who appears as a frog—but as a default status they are always serpentine.

At the heart of the nature of the nāga is its liminality. The nāga seems to be neither entirely human nor entirely snake nor entirely god, but some sort of being that transcends earthly categories, even emic Pāli categories. Throughout Indic literature, we frequently see a mysterious visitor being asked, “Are you a nāga?” This mystique gives the nāga a peculiar sort of power. Heinrich Zimmer notes that for South Indian dynasties, to have a nāga or nāgini in one’s family tree “gives one a background.” Indeed, several notable Indic dynasties, in particular southern ones, trace their lineage back to a nāga or nāgini.³⁸

In a broad, cursory survey of Pāli sources, we see nāgas as shape-shifters, transforming themselves into whatever form is most appropriate to their circumstances. For example, the nāga Mucalinda transforms into a giant snake who is able to wrap his coils seven times around Gotama as he meditates under the Mucalinda tree.³⁹ In canonical and extracanonical stories, nāgas classically change into Brahmin youths to be able to approach the Buddha or be ordained into the saṅgha so they can hear the dhamma being preached. Their serpentine nature is inevitably revealed, and they are ridiculed and punished for their deception (or perhaps just for being snakes).

In the plastic arts, nāgas are treated with a range of representations, from the fully serpentine Mucalinda to completely anthropomorphized nāgarājas, such as those depicted at Amarāvatī. They are shown attending relic enshrinement ceremonies with their wives and are identifiable as nāgas only by the stylized, turbanlike headdresses they wear, which feature a frontal, cobra-hood-like protuberance, indicating the nāga’s polycephalous nature. In both the Jātaka and Mahāvaṃsa accounts, although it is clear that nāgas are figures in the stories, the actual physical form they take is unclear. In the first chapter of the Mahāvaṃsa, the status of nāgas as a group seems more salient than the exact type of body they may possess. No references in the first chapter indicate any particular interest on the part of the author-compiler as to what physical form the nāgas take. However, as we will see in chapter 4, nāgas are decidedly serpentine when in the nāgaloka in the Mahāvaṃsa’s later chapters.

In contrast, the Jātakas are filled with stories of the nāgas’ shape-shifting powers. We see much shape-shifting in the Bhūridatta Jātaka alone, which for me begs the question of what is the default status or resting nature of the nāgas when they are not in disguise. Interestingly, references to appendages (arms and trunks) abound when the nāgas are situated in the nāgaloka. For example, Bhūridatta’s nagīnī wives flail their arms in distress when he is discovered missing in the human realm.⁴⁰

Nāgarājas typically take one of two primary forms, one fully snake and the other anthropomorphic, so regal in countenance and accoutrements that this form is compared to the god Sakka. Nāgas take a human form frequently, and they seem to live quite comfortably with it. The emphasis that Buddhist texts place on the act of taking a human form suggests that the default form of a nāga is, in fact, that of a snake. For example, when the nāgarāja Dhatarāṭṭha wants to fool his bride Samuddajā (who, remember, is the daughter of a human prince and a nagīnī and later is Bhūridatta’s mother) into believing she is in the world of men, not the nāga realm, he orders by official proclamation that all inhabitants must not reveal their snake form to her.⁴¹ All residents of the nāgaloka hide their “true form” in this elaborate scheme. Later, one of Samuddajā’s own children (Bhūridatta’s brother Ariṭṭha) decides while nursing from her⁴² to reveal his true nāga body to her by letting his long tail hit her foot. Rudely awakened from her breastfeeding, she is so shocked she pierces his eye with her fingernail.⁴³ Bhūridatta chooses between a regally adorned princely body worthy of Sakka and a simple (albeit impressive) cobra body. He assumes the form of a snake (literally, “a body consisting of head and tail only”) resting on top of an anthill in a natural way, as a “real” snake would, in order to observe his fast in the human realm, saying, “Let who will take my skin or muscles or bones or blood.”⁴⁴ He assumes this form knowing full well that he may fall prey to humans, but this possibility is no deterrence because any abuse he suffers in his ascetic practice might further him on his goal. And his sister takes the form of a frog to hide in another brother’s hair when he takes the form of an ascetic Brahmin man.

In several Indic texts, we see the perennial tension between the garuḍa, an eaglelike bird, and the nāga, its main source of food. In the Bhūridatta Jātaka, the story of a nāga whisked away for food dangling from the garuḍa’s talons makes a psychological and physical imprint on the landscape of men. As the garuḍa rests in a banyan tree, holding his prey after a successful hunt, the nāga wraps its tail around the tree. When the garuḍa flies off, the nāga pulls the tree right out of the ground. The ascetic Brahmin recluse living at the ashram where this happens uses it as an opportunity to discuss karma (the nāga, he says, accrued no negative karma because he did not intend to uproot the mammoth tree).⁴⁵ What we can ascertain from this story is that the nāga in fact does have a snake body.

When Alambāyana beats Bhūridatta into submission, we see that the latter is most certainly in a snake form and that in this form he is mortal. Alambāyana holds the snake upside down by the tail and forces him to vomit; he crushes the snake’s bones and rolls him into a basket to carry him.⁴⁶ And then, of course, Bhūridatta is forced to perform as a snake at the snake charmer’s will. Even if Bhūridatta is so assiduously following the precepts, once night is over (marking the end of the fasting period, when he usually turns into a princely figure for his return to the nāgaloka), why doesn’t he escape? He can effortlessly turn into any number of beings, and it seems that nāgas, like the jewels they covet, can slip readily into the earth. Yet Bhūridatta stays in his snake form to suffer under his oppressive and selfish master, and in doing so he presents the reader with a moral character so assiduous in his right practice that the reader is compelled to amplify his or her own understanding of morality. Charles Hallisey and Anne Hansen write about the use of animal characters in moral narratives: “Nor do animals in the Jātakas exhibit what we would take to be their biological instincts: moral snakes in the Jātakas do not bite…. [T]he use of animal stories among Buddhists appears to be a sophisticated imaginative practice, one which is a creative response to the social patterns that Buddhists shared with their non-Buddhist neighbors.”⁴⁷

Just as Bhūridatta’s expedient choice to submit to his tormenter suggests his own “creative response” within the text, so the inclusion of morally endowed nāga-agents in the texts indicate the Buddhist writers’ imaginative response to an expanded vision of the world and history. Considering why the Buddha might have taken a nāga birth engages the reader in worklike ways. Certainly, he was able to prime himself for buddhahood by taking this birth. But outside the text, for the reader, that the Buddha himself was born in the lowest of the low forms to best cultivate sīla (morality) becomes a lesson for deep reflection. The reader must ask, If Bhūridatta, handicapped by a snake birth, could act with such moral sophistication, how much more so should I be able to, blessed as I am with a human birth?

Closely related to the nāgas’ ontological status is their soteriological aptitude. The idea of soteriological aptitude relates to the operative ethics within the stories—namely, how the nāgas’ snake-beingness affects the way they live their current lives and how it influences their decisions for the next life. The ethics operate within the story as motivation for and explanation of characters’ behaviors and thoughts. The ethical dilemmas negotiated within the text produce related ethical implications for the reader-hearer outside the text as the nāgas draw the reader-hearer into a participatory relationship with the story and the agents of the text itself.

That there is tension regarding the nāgas’ soteriological aptitude is evident in both the Bhūridatta Jātaka and the Mahāvaṃsa. We must remember that in the Jātaka, it is the Buddha in his former life who is the nāga, making the level of soteriological aptitude abundantly clear—a nāga can aspire to become and actually become the Buddha! In the Mahāvaṃsa, too, the Buddha himself legitimates the nāgas’ soteriological potential: they are brought into the saṅgha as the first converts, and the Buddha explicitly accepts alms from them, initiating the reciprocity that leads to a better birth. And yet nāgas are ill prepared to reach enlightenment in their current state of existence. They, like the yakkhas, are bodhi challenged.⁴⁸

However, the nāgas (liminal characters that they are) are also considered to be able to deal with sensitive, deep material that even humans might not be ready or able to deal with.⁴⁹ In the Bhūridatta Jātaka, personal cultivation of morality (sīla) motivates Bhūridatta to pursue a better rebirth. Bhūridatta is so set on attaining a better rebirth that he does not defend himself when the snake charmer challenges him. He does not try to escape, either, choosing instead to submit to another’s will so as not to accrue undue pāpa (demerit or negative karmic value) that would jeopardize his plans for a better rebirth. He even refuses to allow himself to feel anger toward his friend who has betrayed his confidence by leading the snake charmer to Bhūridatta’s anthill: “if I were angry at him for his treachery, my moral character would be injured. Now my first of all duties is to keep the fast-day in its four periods—that must remain inviolate; so whether Alambāyana cut me to pieces or cook me or fix me on a spit, I must at all events not be angry with him.”⁵⁰ Even as Alambāyana poisons him with herbs and beats him up, Bhūridatta keeps his sights fixed beyond his current birth: “The pure-natured Nāga king did not allow himself to feel any anger through fear of violating the moral precepts, and though he opened his eyes did not open them to the full.”⁵¹ Opening his eyes fully could be disastrous; the gaze of a nāga could be deadly, and Bhūridatta is intent on keeping his precept of doing no harm. Although Bhūridatta could do something in his defense, he chooses not to. This exercise of agency indicates his eventual soteriological aptitude in spite of his present low birth and low nature. By seeking to actively follow the precept of nonharm, Bhūridatta assures himself a future that will be closer to the Buddha and the dhamma.

Even if nāgas follow the precepts and are moral exemplars, the tradition is explicit that they are incapable of reaching enlightenment in their corrupt birth station. One must be human to aspire to enlightenment. In some Pāli sources, the nāgas are not in fact classed specifically as animals; the parameters of their classification are somewhat malleable, especially in the Mahāvaṃsa and Bhūridatta Jātaka, as we have seen. Their ontological status seems less important than their fervent expression of agency and their self-engineered soteriological transformation from unworthy to worthy, but they must wrestle with their nāga status nonetheless. Continually stressed is the depravity of nāga status, which is so powerfully felt by particularly morally striving nāgas that they yearn for proximity to the Buddha or at least for a human birth, where actions may lead to a better rebirth. A reader, then, encounters the nāga as a particularly provocative character, inciting him or her to be imaginative or even grateful for his or her good fortune not to have been born with the same soteriological handicap. If even one so low as a nāga such as Bhūridatta can strive for the perfection of morality, how much more should I, born human, do the same?

Why might the author-compiler of the Mahāvaṃsa have employed the narrative trope of the nāga? In a text that ostensibly catalogs the history of the island from the initial visits of the legitimating Buddha to the reign of Mahāsena, beginning chapter I with the nāgas may be a move to suggest that this text is more than mere chronology. The Mahāvaṃsa’s author-compiler knew that the text’s audience would be familiar with the nāgas’ range of behaviors and aptitudes, which suggests that he believed that the ideals and intentions spelled out in the proem—to produce saṃvega and pāsada in the readers—could be supported through the use of this narrative trope.

As indicated in the historical survey in chapter 1, different social strata were clearly divided and yet mutually dependent in the world that spawned the Mahāvaṃsa. The textual community of the Mahāvaṃsa likely depended on royal patronage. In that light, stories about animals, who are removed from the human hierarchical schema, are especially significant for the audience, whether a monk, layperson, or the king himself: “Using animals as ethical exemplars,” state Hallisey and Hansen, “provides a way of discussing generic moral virtues—gratitude, generosity, loyalty—without any misleading references to specific social locations. That is, the use of a human exemplar would inevitably run the risk of obscuring the proper perception of moral action, and of the causes and effects of that action, because there would be the possibility that a reader or listener would interpret that action within the local social framework.”⁵⁴ As we have seen, the nāgas’ ontological status as beings of nonhuman birth does not diminish their soteriological aptitude, consisting of an intense desire to be near the Buddha, his relics, and his dhamma. It is clear that this status does not diminish the nāgas’ moral didacticism either.

Evidence of this claim can be seen in tales of the nāgas’ intense desire to join the saṅgha. In some such tales, the nāgas go undercover, assuming human form, even though their inclusion in the saṅgha is prohibited in the Vinaya. The Vinaya story of the nāga who fools the saṅgha in order to have access to the dhamma is frequently retold. A nāga, ashamed of his nāga status, wants to gain (or regain) human status. The sight of renunciants leading chaste lives and practicing the dhamma inspires him. He takes the form of a Brahmin youth, asks to be initiated into the saṅgha, and is eventually ordained. One morning his roommate wakes up early to practice walking meditation outside of the cell. The nāga feels secure that his roommate is gone, and so, when he falls back asleep, he reveals his true, natural, default nāga form. The roommate, of course, returns to find snake coils pouring out of the cell. His screaming wakes the nāga, who resumes his human form and then has to explain his motivations to the community of monks. The monks bring the case to the Buddha, who proclaims that nāgas cannot advance by spiritually practicing the dhamma and vinaya (the monastic rules themselves) but that they can observe ritual fasting and the Uposatha (special observances on quarter days of the lunar calendar) to secure a better rebirth. The Buddha forbids the ordaining of animals, even stating that if one is ordained by accident, he should be expelled.⁵⁵

This story shows that although the paths toward spiritual attainment available to humans are not open to nāgas, nāgas ultimately do have access to a path, albeit a longer one. This story is part of the Vinaya and thus anticipates a monastic audience. In fact, it is located at the very outset of the Vinaya, at the threshold to the rest of the text.⁵⁶ A reader must practically enter the text through the nāga story, just as a reader of the Mahāvaṃsa does. This is also a significant story with ongoing practical effects for the monks; in the upasampadā ceremony, when novices undergo higher ordination, even today the simple question is asked whether the monk-to-be is in fact a nāga or not.⁵⁷ DeCaroli says that this practice is “a good case of a monastic rule based on the acceptance of spirit-deities as a reality.”⁵⁸ I would add that underlying this reality is the urge to be in proximity to the Buddha and the teachings and that a monastic reader might be inclined to feel a sense of gratitude that he finds himself fully human and thus capable of pursuing the Buddhist path. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, the more a reader-hearer is made to feel special in the text, privileged to be among the “good people” to whom the text is directed, the more compelled he or she is to change behaviors and become a better monk.

Nāgas are interesting to a human audience and useful as teaching devices because of their human characteristics. The nāgas we encounter in Pāli texts sometimes appear in human forms, but even when they take on the commonplace physical characteristics of snakes, they still talk, act, and think very much like humans. Nāgas share many human qualities, such as the desire to be close to the Buddha for moral edification as well as the less-desirable inclinations toward covetousness and the tendency to cling. In this way, the human audience can sympathize with the nāgas. For example, a reader of the Bhūridatta Jātaka sympathizes with the beaten nāga Bhūridatta rather than with any of the human characters in the story. This arousal of sympathy might be what Hallisey and Hansen refer to as a “sophisticated imaginative practice,” a means by which the hearer-reader is transformed through a mental experience by the text’s otherwise whimsical material. The emotion resulting from the arousal of sympathy is real, felt, and able to be acted upon by the audience, just like the saṃvega and pasāda aroused through a reading of the Mahāvaṃsa.

In the end, however, the nāga is not human, and the emotional crescendo of both of these stories depends on this fact. Nāgas cannot, in their current form of existence, pursue the most direct path toward buddhahood—entering the saṅgha—but instead must resort to other, more indirect means such as practicing the five precepts diligently, fasting, and undertaking the triple refuge in order to aspire to a better birth in the next life. The nāga is an altogether different character who desperately wants to pursue the righteous life but who is limited by his birth. The “sophisticated imaginative practice” of empathizing with the distinctly “other” nāga may thus result in a sense of urgency regarding one’s own practice and moral conviction. The relationship of the human audience to the nāga, then, is multivalent, predicated simultaneously on the sympathy generated when the human can recognize himself in the nāga’s emotions and exploits in the narratives as well as on the empathy aroused by the human’s awareness of the nāga’s inherent otherness. Both responses to the nāga depend on an engaged and sophisticated imagination.

However, this facile bifurcation (readers are interested in nāgas because of similarities; readers are interested in nāgas because of differences) is problematized when it is understood through the Buddhist conception of time—the very understanding of time that is made central in the Mahāvaṃsa through its focus on the relics and chronicling history and in the Jātakas through the representation of the multitude of the Buddha’s past lives. In Theravāda Buddhism, one does not have just a single life to live in order to perfect oneself. One follows a long and arduous path on one’s way to buddhahood. This fact is reiterated at the very outset of the Mahāvaṃsa, right after the proem, in verses I.5–11, where we see the bodhisatta declaring his intentions to attain buddhahood in front of all twenty-four previous buddhas, all the while attaining each of the pāramitās through various births over a vast swath of time. The cultivation of ethics (here indicated by the bodhisatta’s cultivation of the perfections) is thus coordinated with the passage of time. The passage of time is “textualized” in our two sources and is, in fact, the “ultimate referent.”⁵⁹

As we can see, even in the canonical material the nāgas are depicted as striving for better births and to participate in the Buddha’s dhamma. The nāgas are not simply chthonic, indigenous animist elements that infiltrate the orthodoxy, nor are they beings of strictly local concern. Quite the opposite, nāga characters are literary devices employed by orthodox textual producers in even the most “closed” sections of the canon, such as the Vinaya. They occupy a position of prominence in the texts and in the very practices that literally make monks. Their slippery nature provides the storyteller with an ideal character through which questions of ethics and orthopraxy may be addressed.

But in the Vinaya story about the nāga who tries to be initiated into the saṅgha by disguising himself as a Brahmin, the deception is not what prevents the nāga from remaining a part of the saṅgha; it is his actual birth status that undermines his good intentions and the efficacy of his actions toward his goal. In the Bhūridatta Jātaka, we see that the virtuous snake undergoes humiliation and torture at the hands of his oppressor when he might be able to, on his own effort, escape with a simple change of shape. Why does the nāga willingly endure such degradation? Perhaps it is to live to the extreme of his vows, concentrating his effort instead on the accumulation of merit to escape the nāga status by remaining, in fact, a snake. What might this choice convey to a textual community? It may suggest that one needs to work with what one has or that the harder one has it in life, the sweeter the result. This lesson echoes the relationship between saṃvega and pasāda in the Mahāvaṃsa, where the resulting serene satisfaction is worth the stress of the initial agitation.