Garuda is a divine being of Hindu tradition with a full birth narrative in the Mahabharata. Born to Vinata, and enormous from the moment of hatching, he flies to heaven to seize the amrita, the elixir of immortality, in order to ransom his mother from servitude to her co-wife Kadru and the serpent nagas; he defeats the gods guarding it but strikes a bargain with Vishnu and Indra so that the nagas never actually drink it. Thereafter he becomes the mount (vahana) of Vishnu and the sworn enemy of serpents. The enmity of eagle and snake, of Garuda and the nagas, is one of the organising oppositions of Hindu and later Buddhist myth, read variously as sun against water, sky against underworld, or the soaring spirit against the earthbound.
Garuda's Buddhist afterlife runs in a direction distinct from his Hindu one: in Tibetan tradition he appears as the khyung, a great bird-being absorbed from pre-Buddhist Bon religion into Vajrayana practice, retained there as a protector figure and a symbol of fierce, swift wisdom rather than as Vishnu's mount, since Vishnu himself has no comparable place in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon. The khyung's iconography, a raptor-headed figure often shown consuming a serpent, preserves Garuda's ancient enmity with the nagas even as the surrounding theology, and the deity he serves, changes completely from the Vaishnava original.