Sakra

Sakra (Shakra), the mighty one, is a common Vedic epithet of Indra, the king of the gods and lord of storm, thunder and rain, who wields the vajra (thunderbolt) to slay the drought-serpent Vritra and release the waters, and who rides the white elephant Airavata at the head of the devas in their wars with the asuras. Supreme among the gods in the oldest Vedic hymns, Indra later yields precedence to the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The name Sakra had a notable second life outside Hinduism: Buddhism adopted Sakra as the title of the ruler of the Trayastrimsha heaven, a well-disposed and pious deity who honours and attends the Buddha, so that the storm-king of the Veda continues, under this name, as a devout figure in Buddhist cosmology across Asia. In this atlas Sakra, the sky-lord, is set as a face of Uranus.

Indra has the largest number of Rigvedic hymns addressed to any single deity, around 250 of the Rigveda's roughly 1,028 hymns, a scale of Vedic attestation matched by almost no other god, so his gradual eclipse by the Trimurti is a shift within an extraordinarily well documented cult rather than the fading of a minor figure. His worship continues today as a living civic rite in the Kathmandu Valley, where Indra Jatra, an eight day festival tradition holds was founded by King Gunakamadeva around the tenth century CE, marks the Newar new year with chariot processions of Bhairav and the living goddess Kumari and giant Akash Bhairav masks, one of the clearest instances of a Vedic sky king's cult surviving, transformed, into contemporary Himalayan Hinduism.

Where the Rigveda gives Indra a warrior's temperament, Buddhist art and narrative recast him as Sakra, a devout and orderly heavenly king who exists chiefly to witness, protect and serve the Buddha rather than to fight for cosmic supremacy. Early Buddhist reliefs at sites such as Sanchi and Bharhut show Sakra descending a triple ladder of gold, silver and crystal alongside Brahma, escorting the Buddha back to earth after the Buddha spent a rains retreat teaching his mother in the Trayastrimsha heaven, an episode retold in art across South and Southeast Asia and one of the standard scenes of the Buddha's biographical cycle.

Sakra also appears at the Buddha's birth, at his enlightenment, and at his death, generally as a supporting, worshipful presence rather than an active agent, a marked change from the combative Vedic Indra who slays Vritra and drinks soma before battle. His attribute the vajra, the thunderbolt he wields against the drought serpent in Vedic myth, was carried into Buddhist iconography and given to Vajrapani, one of the Buddha's protector deities, whose name literally means thunderbolt in hand, so that Sakra's signature weapon effectively migrated to a new figure even as Sakra himself continued to reign as king of the Trayastrimsha gods. In Newar Buddhist and Hindu practice in the Kathmandu Valley, Sakra and Indra are treated as names for the same figure rather than separate deities, an equivalence that lets the old Vedic storm king continue to receive devotion within a thoroughly Buddhist ritual calendar.