Across various religious and cultural contexts, serpentine figures such as Indian and Indonesian nāgas, Tibetan klu and Chinese long and jiao function as providers of fresh water, as mythological antagonists or as ambivalent characters. This panel seeks to add fresh perspectives to the old comparative project by focusing on their fluidity between human and nonhuman realms, between upper and lower worlds, between religious, ethnic or gender identities, and between different moral standards. In many cases, this metaphorical fluidity goes along with a close link to water resources, which enters the human sphere from below (through fountains and springs) or from above (from the clouds). As these border regions of the human or cultural sphere are especially vulnerable, the ritual means to stabilize the relations between humans and their environment are of high interest. Which roles do nāgas and dragons play within these negotiations?
Wendy Doniger has suggested that in Hindu mythology the snake is ‘a creature of darkness’ (2009: 266). In the Mahābhārata’s opening frame stories, Takṣaka, the king of snakes, is cast as the mortal enemy of the Pāṇḍavas. Despite having mysterious and dangerous connotations in the frame stories, elsewhere in the text snake characters are generally represented quite positively. This paper will focus on the four snake characters who are given the most prominent speaking roles in the Mahābhārata: Ulūpī, Nahuṣa, Padmanābha, and Nāgabhārya. As I will show, these snakes are conversant in dharma, offer instruction to their human interlocutors, and are cast in the roles of helpers and allies. By looking at these characters together, we not only see that wisdom is as much of a characteristic for nāgas as danger, but also that snakes are not a homogenous category, but depicted in a variety of ways.
At early Buddhist sites on the Indian subcontinent, nāgas as cobra beings are depicted with a remarkable conception of bodily fluidity between human and cobra forms. Analysis of Buddhist visual narratives and textual accounts in Pāli and Sanskrit reveals their ability to take on the guise of a human, a defining feature that has been overlooked in previous scholarship which considers sculptures from the period before the Common Era. Examining their identities from the perspective of a Buddhist worshipper, I consider nāgas in visual representations with a status between animals, human, and divine beings, exploring how nāgas can inhabit heavenly places, yet remain confined to their unfortunate birth status as animals.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nagpur, central India, my presentation explores the multivalence of nāga figures, as understood by contemporary Ambedkarite, Japanese, and Taiwanese Buddhists who collaborate on monument building and educational projects. Despite the groups vastly different historical-political backgrounds and sectarian identities, they strategically manage their interactions by being somewhat cognizant of their differences without letting them hinder their respective projects. nāgas and their significance offer a remarkable shared point of reference, through which the variation of their perspectives can be appreciated. At this point in these relatively recent collaborations (going back barely thirty years), intense dialog and discussion of differences has not been a priority among the groups. Thus, their perspectives on nāgas remain independent but become entwined in the same geographic space—a vivid illustration of how the fluidity of nāgas allow the groups to communicate with their own respective constituents and each other.
Three different woodcut illustrations on the same topic are found in the Cibei daochang chanfa 慈悲道場懺法(The Merciful Repentance Ritual). The scripture was attributed to Emperor Liang Wudi (r. 502-549), whose wife Empress Chi became a python after her death because her cruel jealousy in life had brought harm to others. She told of her great suffering in her new form of a snake and pleaded for the emperor’s rescue. The emperor compiled and performed an elaborate repentance ritual. As a result of his actions the empress returned to the emperor in the form of a lovely lady to report that the ritual had been successful and that she had been reborn in heaven.
The author tries to analyse how the mystery of python exerted impact on Chinese folk culture and dramas.
This paper explores the hierarchization among dragons and snakes in Chinese hydrolatry. Most cultures perceive snakes as ambiguous, but Chinese culture distinguished positive and negative traits into dragons and snakes. This distinction was somewhat superficial because there are various entangled categories of dragons and giant snakes. Among these, long-dragons came to represent the empire, the serpentine, riverine jiao-dragons represented the indigenous groups on the fringes of the empire. Chinese texts presented the latter as “unaccomplished”, “requiring” civilization to attain long-dragonhood, i.e., “to become Chinese.”
Aside from introducing the Nagaraja to China, Buddhists also undertook anti-snake campaigns to claim local religious spaces. Buddhism hence became a reliable tool to subjugate “heterodox” local cultures. These reacted with various coping mechanisms to protect particularly their female deities.
A contemporary tale from southern Sichuan reflects these cultural conflicts and ascribes different metaphorical roles to the serpent, tortoise, and Dragon King, depending on the narrator.
The valley of Pindar river, in the Garhwal Himalaya region of Northwest India, is believed by local Hindus to be the territory of the Naiṇī or Nāginā Devīs, the nine serpent shaped goddesses or mothers. According to local stories, they came from their underworld, the pātāl lok or nāg lok, to participate in a sacrificial ritual giving shape to the “world of mortals” (mṛtyulok). Here, they were harassed by a shepherd, so each of them took refuge in a human village. Two or three times a century, each of the Naiṇīs is invited to come from the nāglok into her respective village, where she is embodied as a bamboo pole to wander through her territory for six months.