Earth and Water

Leave the mountain now, and the bright company of the great gods, and look down — at the ground under your feet and the water under the ground. There is an older religion there. Before India built soaring temples to Vishnu and Shiva, before the Puranas, in some cases before the classical gods had taken the shapes we know, people worshipped the powers of the earth and the water: the spirits of the tree and the pool and the buried hoard, the serpents of the well and the river. These are the yakshas and the nagas, and they are among the oldest divine beings in the subcontinent. The newer heaven was built over them, but it never quite replaced them, and it never entirely tamed them.

The keepers of the buried wealth

Begin with the yakshas, the spirits of the earth. A yaksha is, at root, a power of place and of plenty — of the fertile tree, the guardian grove, and above all of wealth, the treasure that the earth holds hidden in its depths. To the ancient imagination the ground was full of buried riches — hoards, veins of metal, the fatness of the soil itself — and the yaksha was the being who kept it. Their king is Kubera, the pot-bellied lord of wealth, guardian of the northern direction, master of the treasure-city Alakā, one of the great guardians of the world we will meet again among the directional gods. To this day, a yaksha’s blessing is prosperity, and their ambivalence is the ambivalence of wealth: freely given it enriches, wrongly seized it destroys.

Two things about the yakshas deserve special weight. The first is a fact of art history that ought to be more famous than it is. When you look for the oldest surviving monumental stone sculpture in India — the first time an Indian carved a divine figure at human scale and larger out of stone — you are looking at yakshas and yakshinis. The colossal Parkham Yaksha and the superb Didarganj Yakshini — traditionally dated to the Mauryan era, around the third to second centuries BCE, though the Didarganj figure’s date is debated and some scholars place it centuries later — predate almost all our images of the classical gods. India learned to sculpt the divine by sculpting these earth-spirits first. The great gods, when their images came, inherited a language of the body — the powerful frame, the full breath of life, the serene fleshiness — that the sculptors had first developed for the yakshas. The classical divine image stands, quite literally, on the shoulders of these older powers.

The second is a pair of stories in which the yaksha does something no mere nature-spirit should be able to do: it humbles the gods and it tests the wisest of men. In the Kena Upaniṣad (its third and fourth sections), after the gods win a victory and begin to congratulate themselves, a mysterious yakṣa appears — an unknown presence, a “wonderful being” — and the proud gods Agni and Vāyu, sent to discover what it is, find they cannot burn a blade of grass or blow it away before it. The yaksha is Brahman itself, the ultimate reality, appearing in the humblest and most unexpected guise to shatter the gods’ conceit. And in the Mahābhārata’s Vana Parva, the book of the forest, at the lowest point of the Pandavas’ exile, a yaksha guarding a lake strikes down four of the five brothers and puts a series of profound riddles to the eldest, Yudhiṣṭhira — the famous Yakṣa-praśna — restoring the dead only when he answers with perfect wisdom and humility; and the yaksha, too, turns out to be a god in disguise, Dharma, his own father. In both texts the yaksha is the sacred wearing its plainest, strangest mask — a reminder that the highest truth may meet you not on the mountain but at the edge of a forest pool, in a form you would have walked straight past.

The serpents who hold up the world

Now go one layer deeper, into the water and the earth below the earth, and you meet the nagas — the serpent-beings, part human and part cobra, who are perhaps the most beloved and most feared of all India’s non-celestial divinities. The naga is the genius of the water: of the well, the spring, the river, the tank, the monsoon-cloud, and of the great subterranean realm of Pātāla, the underworld of jewelled serpent-palaces. To control water in a land shaped by the monsoon is to control life itself, and so the nagas are guardians of the most precious thing there is; the festival of Nāga-pañcamī still honours them across India, milk poured at the mouths of their holes and stones.

And the nagas hold up the cosmos — literally, in the tradition’s imagination. Śeṣa, also called Ananta, “the endless,” is the vast thousand-hooded serpent who floats on the cosmic ocean between the destruction of one world and the making of the next, forming the couch on which Vishnu sleeps; and it is on Śeṣa’s hoods, the texts say, that the whole earth is steadied and borne. Vāsuki is the serpent the gods and demons wrapped around Mount Mandara to churn the ocean of milk, his body the rope that turned the mountain and drew out the nectar of immortality — and the poison. Takṣaka is the serpent-king whose bite fulfils a curse and sets the whole frame-story of the Mahābhārata in motion; Kāliya is the many-hooded serpent poisoning the Yamuna until the child Krishna dances him into submission on his hoods. Serpents thread through every major Hindu story, at once the danger in the water and the support of the world.

And they keep the ambivalence of the yakshas, doubled. The snake is death — the literal, sudden death that waits in the grass and the well — and the snake is also the guardian of treasure, the emblem of fertility and regeneration (it sheds its skin and is renewed), the coiled power at the base of the yogic body, the ornament at Shiva’s throat, the couch of Vishnu’s rest. In Bengal the snake-goddess Manasā is propitiated with a mixture of love and dread that captures the whole class exactly: a power that can kill you and a power that can save you, and the only wise course is to honour her.

Two powers of the world below

Set the yakshas and the nagas side by side and you can see the shape of this older stratum of Indian religion. The great gods of the last two movements are, overwhelmingly, gods of the sky and the height — the mountain-top, the heaven of Indra, the celestial Vaikuntha and Kailasa. The yakshas and nagas are the gods of the depth — the buried hoard and the underworld water, the tree-root and the serpent-hole. They are the divine as it rises up out of the land itself, tied to this grove and that spring, older than the temples, never fully absorbed into the tidy hierarchy above them. This is why they remain so ambivalent: they were never quite domesticated, never entirely enrolled as obedient servants of the celestial gods. They keep a wildness and an independence that the sky-gods’ polished courts have lost.

And that independence is precisely their value to this treatise’s argument. An ecosystem is not only its bright canopy; it is the soil and the water-table and the deep roots, and a religion imagined as an ecosystem must have its underground. The yakshas and nagas are that underground — the powers of earth and water on whom, quite literally in the case of Śeṣa, the whole visible world is held up. Above them the celestial artists make their music. We rise now, from the depths to the heavens, to meet the singers and dancers of the sky.