The Snake Who Sheltered the Buddha

In Buddhism the naga is reinterpreted without being discarded. The serpent-king Mucalinda shelters the meditating Buddha from a storm by spreading his hood over him, one of the most widely represented scenes in Buddhist art. Nagas are said to guard scriptures until the world is ready for them, the philosopher Nagarjuna is traditionally said to have retrieved the Prajnaparamita sutras from their keeping, and they appear as protectors of the Dharma throughout Buddhist Asia. In Southeast Asia the naga fuses with local water-serpent belief to become a central architectural motif, guarding temple stairways and bridges from Cambodia to Thailand and Laos. The Chinese and Southeast Asian dragon was partly assimilated to the naga in Buddhist transmission, so that the same word is sometimes rendered "dragon", a translator's equivalence that blurs two distinct beings.

Southeast Asian temple architecture gives the naga its most monumental physical form: the causeways of Angkor Wat and other Khmer temples are flanked by long balustrades carved as the sinuous bodies of multi-hooded nagas, most often shown with seven heads fanned out like a crown, an image widely read as representing a rainbow bridge connecting the human world to the abode of the gods. Lao and Thai riverine tradition adds a further, more local layer again: the Mekong itself is popularly held to have been shaped by the passage of a great naga, and unexplained fireballs rising from the river's surface on certain nights are still popularly attributed to nagas living beneath it, a living folk belief rather than a textual doctrine.