Deity

Naga

នាគ

A naga is a many-headed serpent of Khmer legend, religion and art, a spirit of the waters.

A naga (នាគ)[1] is a many-headed serpent of Khmer legend, religion and art, a spirit of the waters.[2] In Glaize's guide, the naga comes from India; it is the serpent of the Khmer founding legend, and a symbol of water.[2] Nagas line the causeways of the Angkor temples, pull the serpent rope in the gods' tug of war at the gates of Angkor Thom, and shelter the meditating Buddha with their raised hoods.[2][3][4]

Form and meaning

In Khmer art the naga is a stylized cobra. Its heads always come in an odd number, from three to nine, spread in a fan.[2] A naga king is a nagaraja, and a female naga a nagi.[2] In Maurice Glaize's guide to the Angkor monuments, the nagas count among the demigods of the temple carvings, as genies of the water and descendants of the Nagaraja, the legendary ancestor of the Khmer kings.[2]

Chun Chanboth wrote in a Radio Free Asia history series about the lower Mekong and its delta. In his account, a group of Khmer who believed in the naga, or who traced their ancestors to the naga lineage, had lived there for a very long time.[1] Rüdiger Gaudes, drawing on material gathered by Porée-Maspero, wrote that the Khmer took the name of the Indian nagas for their own water spirits, or identified the two, as Indian ideas spread.[5] In his account, the Khmer king of the nagas is Krong Peali, who holds up the earth. People keep his position among the cardinal directions in mind before an important undertaking, above all the building of a house. Krong Peali is the Bali of Hindu myth, who spread his rule over heaven, earth and the underworld until he was overcome and sent down to the underworld, where he reigns as king.[5]

The naga princess

A Khmer legend, Preah Thong and Neang Neak, traces the first kings to a marriage between a prince and a naga. In the telling Glaize recorded, Preah Thong (ព្រះថោង),[1] a Hindu prince banished by his father, stopped for the night on a sandbank. There he met a naga princess, whose father, the Nagaraja, ruled the land. He married her. The Nagaraja drank up the water that covered the land, gave the new country to his son-in-law, named it Kambuja and founded a capital for him.[2] The princess is known as Neang Neak (នាងនាគ).[1][5]

The tellings differ. In some, the naga king creates the land by drinking the ocean; in one, the couple's own daughter bears the god Indra a son.[5] An inscription from Mison in Champa names the Brahman Kaundinya instead of the prince.[2] Chun Chanboth took Hun Tian of the Chinese records, Kaundinya of the Mison inscription and Preah Thong of the royal chronicles as one founder of the first royal line.[1] Gaudes kept them apart: in his reading, Hun Tian belongs to the Chinese legend, Kaundinya to the Sanskrit court tradition and Preah Thong to the later folklore.[5] In Glaize's account, Kaundinya married the nagi Soma and founded the city where the lunar race would rule.[2] Gaudes noted that the reading of Soma as a nagi is disputed: Finot took her as the human wife, not a nagi, and Coedès concluded that Soma was Kaundinya's wife.[5] Of the Preah Thong tellings, Gaudes wrote that the Pali forms of their names show they took shape no earlier than the 14th century.[5]

An older account comes from Zhou Daguan, a Chinese official who traveled to Angkor in the years 1296 to 1297. He was told that a nine-headed serpent spirit, to whom all the land of the kingdom belonged, lived in the king's bedchamber at the top of a golden tower in the palace. Each night it appeared to the king as a woman, and if the king missed a night, the kingdom faced imminent danger.[5] Gaudes suggested a source for the naga king's draining of the land. It could come from a belief that serpents bring the rain and also make the floodwaters go down. He tied this to the yearly floods that farmers of wet rice must manage.[5]

In ritual and festivals

The traditional Khmer wedding retells the marriage. Gaudes wrote that it begins with a symbolic "snake skin" that the bride gives the groom, in memory of Preah Thong's journey to the underworld.[5] In one version of the legend, the prince could enter the realm of the nagas only by holding on to the princess's cloth.[5] At a Khmer wedding ceremony, the bride customarily waits at her parents' home while the groom leads a procession of family and friends there.[6] At a 2011 wedding in Banteay Chhmar, the groom's procession stood for Preah Thong's journey to meet Neang Neak.[6] In the rite known as Preah Thong Taong Sbai Neang Neak, the groom holds the bride's sbai, a shoulder cloth, as they move together. The textile artist Tith Veasna wrote that the sbai takes the place of the naga princess's tail in this rite.[7]

At the Water Festival, Bon Om Touk, the long racing boats carry carved naga prows. Lit boats parade on the river in the evening, and their lights form designs that include nagas.[8]

In temple architecture

Glaize called the naga balustrade, a railing in the form of a serpent, an essentially Khmer motif, entirely original and of fundamental importance.[2] At Bakong, at the end of the 9th century, the naga's body lies on the ground and its heads are massive. Later the body rests on stone blocks, and the heads gain broader crests: flaming at Angkor Wat, an ornamental halo at Beng Mealea. In the style of the Bayon, a huge garuda, the divine bird, rides the naga, as on the terrace of Srah Srang.[2]

As a rule, a moat ringed each temple, and a wide paved causeway crossed it, bordered by naga balustrades on stone blocks.[2] At Angkor Wat the causeway runs 350 meters (1,150 feet). Six stairways with naga heads break each side of it.[2] On some old Khmer bridges, which Glaize thought were probably later, the naga heads shelter an image of the Buddha.[2]

At Neak Pean, two nagas circle the base of a round island in the middle of a pool, their tails twined together to the west; the site takes its name from them. Glaize took them for the two naga kings Nanda and Upananda, whom Indian literature often links with the sacred lake Anavatapta.[2]

The gate causeways

Angkor Thom has five gates.[4][9] On the causeway over the moat to each gate, two rows of large stone figures, gods (devas) on one side and demons (asuras) on the other, pull on a naga.[4] Im Sokrithy has said that, in a way, the scene could suggest a game of tug of war.[4] The figures at the south gate are popularly called the "Giants' Tug of War".[9] Zhou Daguan wrote of 54 huge divinities beside the causeway, holding stone parapets carved as nine-headed serpents, as if to keep the serpents from escaping.[2] Rows of giants gripping the naga also line the four paths across the moats of Preah Khan.[2]

The scene also illustrates the Churning of the Sea of Milk,[4] and the figures pull the naga as if it were a rope.[9] Glaize repeated a suggestion of George Coedès and Paul Mus. In their reading, the naga railing was perhaps a sign for the rainbow, which in Indian tradition joins people with the world of the gods, here brought to earth as the royal city. In their view, by adding the gods and demons, the architect meant to evoke the churning. They saw this picture of the churning, with the moat as the ocean and the wall and its gate as the mountain, as a kind of magic charm to secure victory and prosperity for the country.[2] Im Sokrithy, an archaeologist with the APSARA National Authority, has noted another hypothesis, from the ethnologist Ang Choulean: the story may go back to a Cambodian legend. In it, the land was once an island ruled by Kaundinya and his wife Soma, its first king and queen.[4]

In the Churning of the Sea of Milk

In the Hindu story of the churning, gods and demons use the serpent Vasuki, king of the nagas, to turn Mount Mandara, pulling on him in turn to churn the ocean for the drink of immortality. Turned upside down, the mountain rests its summit on the shell of a turtle, a form of Vishnu.[10] On the great relief of the churning at Angkor Wat, Mount Mandara rests on a tortoise and serves as the pivot, and the serpent is the cord.[2] The demons hold the serpent's head and the gods its tail. Along the base of the panel, Vasuki slides through the water before the churning begins. In the story, the serpent then spits out a deadly venom that spreads over the waves, and Shiva drinks it, which scars his throat.[2]

Sheltering the Buddha

A Buddhist scripture, the Udana, tells how the naga king Muccalinda (also spelled Mucalinda) sheltered the Buddha soon after his awakening. A storm brought seven days of rain, cold wind and darkness while the Buddha sat in meditation. Muccalinda wrapped his coils seven times around the Buddha's body and spread his great hood over him. When the sky cleared, he took the form of a young man and paid homage.[11]

The Buddha seated on a naga was among the most popular images of Angkorian art. The Buddha sits in deep meditation on a many-headed serpent, whose heads rise to form a canopy above him.[3] In the most widely held symbolic reading, the image joins the long-standing Khmer worship of the naga with the Buddha sheltered by Muccalinda; others question that reading and lean toward some kind of Mahayana association.[3] In 1933, the fragments of a monumental Buddha seated on a naga came out of a pit under the paving of the inner chamber (cella) of the Bayon's central shrine. It probably dates to the end of the 12th century.[3]

The Cleveland Museum of Art writes that King Jayavarman VII linked himself with this image and presented himself as the Buddha, upheld by the naga, which in its reading stands for the Khmer people. After his reign, the museum writes, followers of other kinds of Buddhism that came to prevail in Cambodia, Theravada among them, gave the image a new meaning. They read it as the episode when a serpent shielded the Buddha from a flood.[12] Bronzes of the image from Angkor-period Cambodia include the Naga-Enthroned Buddha in Cleveland[12] and Buddha Sheltered by a Naga, a 12th-century bronze in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.[13]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Radio Free Asia Khmer, Chun Chanboth, History of the Khmer in the time of the kingdom of Phnom, part 3 (February 5, 2014; in Khmer)
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 Angkor Database, Maurice Glaize, The Monuments of the Angkor Group (first published 1944; fourth French edition 1993; English translation 1997)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Journal Asiatique, Martin Polkinghorne, Christophe Pottier and Christian Fischer, One Buddha Can Hide Another (2013)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Cambodianess, Isa Rohany, The Five Gateways of Angkor Thom (November 4, 2023)
  5. ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 Asian Folklore Studies, Rüdiger Gaudes, Kaundinya, Preah Thaong, and the Nagi Soma: Some Aspects of a Cambodian Legend (1993)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Visit Banteay Chhmar, Khmer wedding ceremony (undated)
  7. ↑ Cambodianess, Tith Veasna, Sbai in Cambodia: the Graceful Shoulder of Khmer Culture (March 17, 2026)
  8. ↑ Cambodia Kingdom, Cambodia Water Festival 2026: Dragon Boat Races and Celebrations (last verified February 1, 2026)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Cambodianess, Long Ton, Angkor Thom: the Khmer Empire's Enclosed and Complex 12th Century City (April 2, 2022)
  10. ↑ Patrick Kersalé, Sounds of Angkor, Dance through the iconography of Angkor Wat (updated December 5, 2023)
  11. ↑ Access to Insight, Thanissaro Bhikkhu (translator), Muccalinda Sutta: About Muccalinda, Udana 2.1 (August 30, 2012)
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Cleveland Museum of Art, Naga-Enthroned Buddha (undated)
  13. ↑ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Buddha Sheltered by a Naga, Collection API record 39100 (updated April 18, 2026)
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