Ahir Budhnya

The Rigveda has a famous serpent. Ahi is what Vritra is called when the poets want to name what he is rather than what he does, and killing him is the central deed of the collection. So it is worth stopping at the fact that the same word, in the same corpus, also names a being who is invoked among the gods and asked for protection. Ahi Budhnya is a serpent of the deep who is on the right side.

He is thinly attested, though not as thinly as his usual companion. He appears in enumerations, most often beside Aja Ekapada, and he is asked to protect and to keep from harm. He belongs, on the standard classification, to the gods of the middle region, the atmosphere, which puts the deep he is named for in the sky rather than under the sea. Whether that is right is one of the few things about him that can be argued at all.

The pairing with a benevolent serpent tells you something about the shape of the material that the Vritra story on its own hides. Vedic religion did not treat serpents as a category of evil. It treated one particular serpent as an obstruction, because he was lying on the waters and had to be moved, and the word for serpent stayed available for a protector in the same breath. The moral load is on the act, not on the animal, which is a distinction that later traditions in the same region kept, and one that the standard translation of asura as demon tends to obscure elsewhere in the same collection.

Budhna is bottom, base, ground, root. It is the bottom of the sea, the foot of a tree, the base of a post. So the name says serpent of the bottom and leaves the reader to decide which bottom. Three readings are in use. The atmospheric one, which takes the deep as the lower reaches of the middle region and makes him a sky serpent, and which is favoured by the company he keeps in the lists. The oceanic one, which takes it literally and puts him at the floor of the waters, in the position that a great many later Indian serpent figures occupy. And a cosmological one, which takes budhna as the base or foundation of things and reads the deep as the bottom of the world rather than of any particular medium.

This is a real disagreement rather than a blank, which is why the atlas records it as argued and not as unknown. The readings are positions, they have been stated, and the evidence for each of them, thin as it is, can be laid out and compared. That is the difference between this entry and the one for his companion Aja Ekapada, where there is no argument to join.

The name outlived the figure. A later Vaishnava text is titled after him, and the association of serpents with the base of things ran on independently into the cosmology of the great serpent on the cosmic waters. In jyotisha he presides over Uttara Bhadrapada, which is directly after the mansion Aja Ekapada presides over. Two systems apart and two thousand years later, the formula that put the two names together is still putting them together, in order.