Kristin Scheible uncovers the hidden role of nāgas in defining Buddhist treasures and explores their surprising significance in safeguarding sacred relics through early texts
Much of the literature on nāgas in Indian Buddhist monasticism has focused on their rain-making and monastery-protecting duties. However, early Buddhist texts are full of narratives about nāgas serving the Buddha, dharma, and saṅgha by guarding in their subterranean palaces a variety of specifically Buddhist treasures. For example, nāgas played exactly this role in an important Pāli Buddhist text from Nāgārjuna’s roughly contemporaneous and neighbouring Sri Lanka, the Dīpavaṃsa. The fifth century Mahāvaṃsa enhances the depiction of nāgas as hoarders and valuers of treasures. Scheible argues that nāgas were not background characters in the Pāli Buddhist imaginaire around Nāgārjuna’s time; by stealing, hoarding, and venerating various types of sacred relics of the Buddha in their nāgaloka they in fact define what a treasure is.
