Benzaiten is the Buddhist goddess who reached Japan as a form of the Indian Saraswati, and her transmission is a clear example of how a deity is transformed as it travels. She arrived through the Buddhist scripture known in Japan as the Sutra of Golden Light (Konkomyokyo), in which the Indian goddess appears as a protector of the teaching and a bestower of eloquence and wisdom. But the passage across Central Asia, China and finally to Japan changed her considerably.
In India, Saraswati is a river and the goddess of speech, learning and music; the Japanese Benzaiten keeps the water and the music, she is regularly shown holding the biwa, the Japanese lute, but she also gathers new associations, above all with wealth and worldly good fortune, which were not prominent in her Indian form. She becomes a goddess of everything that flows: water, words, music, eloquence, and money. Her shrines are characteristically set by water, on islands, by ponds and springs, and she acquires a strong connection with serpents and dragons, the water-spirits of East Asia, sometimes being shown with a white snake or with a serpent-bodied companion deity coiled about her. In the Buddhist context she remains a protective deva drawn into the Mahayana pantheon, an Indian goddess given a long second life in the religious world of Japan.