A Serpent, a Kingdom, and a Missing Text

The seven hooded serpent rising above this figure's head is not decoration. It is the entire identifying feature that lets a viewer recognize Nagarjuna at all, and it points to one of Buddhist tradition's stranger origin stories for a body of scripture. According to the account this sculpture's iconography assumes, the Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom teachings that underlie the Madhyamaka philosophy Nagarjuna is credited with founding, were not simply written down and transmitted in the ordinary way. The Buddha himself was said to have entrusted them to the nagas, serpent beings inhabiting an underwater kingdom, judging the human world of his own time not yet ready to receive them.

Centuries later, in this telling, Nagarjuna traveled to that submerged kingdom and retrieved the texts, bringing wisdom the world had been waiting for back up into ordinary reach. A sculptor working in seventeenth century Tibet could condense that entire narrative into a single visual cue, a naga hood above the head, confident that anyone looking at the finished bronze would read the whole story instantly. The dharmachakra gesture his hands form, thumb and index finger joined into a small wheel on each hand, completes the message: here is a teacher actively turning the wheel of the doctrine he went to such lengths to recover.