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Chapter 10: Serpents and Buddhas
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118 Peter D. Sharrock Chapter 10 Serpents and Buddhas Peter D. Sharrock Abstract The predominant Buddhist icon of ancient Angkor was a Buddha seated on the coils of a giant multiheaded serpent with a raised cobra hood. This paper addresses the question of why this combination of serpents and Buddhas enjoyed such extraordinary success among the ancient Khmers. The icon is very widely taken to represent the naga Mucalinda sheltering the Buddha from a storm six weeks after his enlightenment. Several scholars have expressed puzzlement at why this minor episode in the Sakyamuni biography should have found such favor with the Mahayanist ancient but few have dismissed it as a wrong interpretation. I will endorse rejection and suggest that the Khmer naga and Mucalinda are doppelgängers with quite different meanings — a conclusion reached after examining the Buddhist contexts of the Khmer icon’s naga-enthroned predecessors in Amaravati, Sri Lanka, Malay Peninsula and northeast Thailand. The Angkorian Buddha, I will claim, should be seen as the Khmer Vairocana or “Sarvavid” (“Omniscient”, named in one key inscription) of the tantric Vajrayana and unrelated to the minor Mucalinda biographical episode which later occasionally appears in the southern Buddhism of modern Thailand, Burma and Cambodia. Introduction A Buddha seated in meditation on the throne-like coils of a huge cobra, whose multiple heads rise splayed in a hood behind him, became the most reproduced and venerated icon of the ancient Khmers of Angkor. Yet the epigraphy of the period never mentions him by name or makes any allusion to the remarkable naga. This icon went on to occupy the place of supreme honor in the central sanctuary of the massive first state Buddhist temple built at the apogee of the ancient Khmer Empire by its greatest king Jayavarman VII. With only lapidary texts in stone surviving the tropical environment, we must rely on iconographic or contextual evidence to interpret the icon. Art historians have generally assumed that the naga symbolises a fusion of Cambodia’s imported and adapted Indic religion with local, primordial worship of the naga spirits of the earth and the waters of its vast irrigation system. Apart from Hiram Woodward and Wibke Lobo, most historians and writers see the Khmer Buddha seated on a naga as originating in and perpetuating the rather minor narrative in the Buddha biographies about a naga called Mucalinda, who left his lake or river to enwrap the meditating Sakyamuni seven times in his coils and cover him completely with his cobra-like hood against an unseasonal storm in the fifth or sixth week of his enlightenment. I, like Woodward and Lobo, want to dissociate the Khmer icon from the Mucalinda myth, and for this purpose I propose describing the icon as a naga-enthroned Buddha rather than as a “naga-protected” Buddha. Woodward long rejected the Mucalinda interpretation in these terms (1979: 72): [The] Nāga-protected Buddha […] should be interpreted not so much as Sākyamuni, sheltered by Mucalinda subsequent to the enlightenment, as a supreme Buddha in the embrace of an autochthonous spirit of the waters. 118 Connecting Empires hi res combin118 118 8/24/2012 9:46:11 PM 119 Serpents and Buddhas Lobo in 1997 noted that the Buddha erected in the central sanctuary of the Bayon appeared to be accorded far greater importance than the minor Mucalinda legend would justify. Lobo claimed he represents a primordial Adibuddha of tantric Buddhism (1997b: 311, translated by the author): This nāga taking the place of a throne indicates that the Buddha represented is in fact the Ādibuddha who, having achieved enlightenment at the dawn of time, embodies the fundamental principal of Buddhism. The Mucalinda association is unsupported by Khmer epigraphy. In centuries of inscriptions from preAngkor to the decline of Angkor, the naga Mucalinda incident is never mentioned. The widespread practice of linking the Khmer icon with the Mucalinda myth does not constitute a scholarly consensus that has been argued for but is a loose convention of the last century. This mismatch of legend and icon should, I suggest, encourage us to take a different approach: we should assume that there was no Mucalinda icon in southern Buddhism before the 13th century — and see whether any evidence counters this. The Mucalinda Myth Pierre Dupont traced the origin of the Buddha seated on the naga to Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda in eastern India. Sculptors chose the Mucalinda episode “with the intention of relating the Buddha to a pre-existing naga cult” (1950: 44...