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Phaya Nak:
Serpent Lord of the Underworld Still Blowing Bubbles

Text & Images : John Cadet

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.gifIt was said of Sir Christopher Wren, who virtually rebuilt London after its Great Fire, "If you seek his monument, look around you."

.gifYou can say pretty much the same in Thailand of Phaya Nak, aka The Serpent Lord of the Underworld. That's to say, he doesn't have a specific locus at which you can pay your respects. In fact, with one spectacular exception, there are no special occasions in which he directly features. And given the civic acknowledgements accorded quite a lot of pretty unusual mythical, legendary and quasi-historical characters right up here in the North this apparent neglect of Phaya Nak is a pretty odd state of affairs.

.gifAll the same, "If you seek his monument…."

.gifThe natural place to start looking around, at least in Southeast Asia, is any Buddhist temple. Take - for example - the ancient foundation of Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, near the top of the mountain dominating the skyline to the west of the city. Just as with every other temple, as you climb the stairway approaching its entrance - passing, incidentally, the image of his consort Mae Toranee (Mother Earth), wringing the terrestrial waters from her hair - you see first the up-reared heads of the Serpent Protector and then his undulating body, serving here as the balustrade at either side of the stairway, and continuing right up to the main doors. The Buddhist explanation for his presence (and hers) is that when Siddharta was approaching the moment of Enlightenment, and shortly after attaining it, these two personages offered timely protection. Mother Earth scattered the enemies threatening to disturb the Great Being's meditation before the critical breakthrough, and the Serpent King raised his hood to keep away the rainstorm that followed. Entering the temple courtyard, furthermore, you see Phaya Nak in an identical form in front of the various chapels, as well as more schematically represented in the eaves and finials of the roofs. The result is that a Buddhist place of worship is seen to be enveloped by the body of the Serpent Lord, above and below. And that's not all. Inside major and minor chapels (viharn and bot) you might well find intricately-worked water-dispensers, used in ordination and other services, with the same artistic and symbolic serpentine representation. But although the Buddhist rationale for Phaya Nak's dominant presence in all Buddhist temples is that it commemorates the protection originally offered the Great Being, and implies the superiority of the Buddha's doctrine, before assuming this is evidence of the total assimilation of the older religious dispensation of South and Southeast Asia by the newer, we'd do well to look a little further afield - to Angkorean civilisation in Cambodia, for example, where the same serpent lord appears so frequently.

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.gifMekong River Home of Phaya Nak

.gifThere are two places at Angkor where his presence is outstandingly represented, the first the causeway leading across to Angkor Thom, the second the bas reliefs on the inner walls of the great temple of Angkor Wat. In both cases, what you're being referred to is an important incident in the Bhagavat Purana where the Great Serpent, here called Vasuki, is being used by the demons and devas as the rope with which to churn the Sea of Milk, in the process producing the drink of immortality, ambrosia, as well as a terrible world-destroying poison.

.gifIt is this myth, rather than the legend associated with the Buddha, that provides a better appreciation of the dominant characteristic of the Great Serpent, however named: his ambivalence. Rightly treated, he behaves with generous benevolence. Treat him disrespectfully, and his response will be devastating.

.gifThis is the message of a well-known tale of Northeast Thailand, called The Legend of Nang Ai and Padaeng. Now the fact is the legends of the doings of the Great Serpent in Thailand are almost innumerable, and presumably this stems from the fact that royal legitimacy in proto-historic Southeast Asia required a dynasty-founding ruler to be either married to or born of the Naga King's daughter, the Naga King understood to be the ultimate owner of the land. Angkorean rulers acknowledged the fact not only by tracing their right to rule from the marriage of the Brahmin hero Kaundinya to Soma (or Willow-leaf), the daughter of the Naga King, but by continuing to believe that the ruler was obliged to cohabit nightly with the spirit of this daughter. "And if one night the spirit does not appear," the Chinese visitor to Angkor in the 13th C., Zhou Daguen, noted, "then the time has come for the barbarian king to die."

.gifBut what these abundant myths and legends on the subject of the Naga King tell us is that when he had been upset, his displeasure was usually expressed not in single deaths but the wholesale destruction of communities and civilisations, through flooding. This is well illustrated in the Nang Ai and Phadaeng legend mentioned above, associated with the Northeastern rocket festival which brings on the rains. According to this legend Phaya Nak avenges the death of his son by drowning an entire kingdom.

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.gifWat Phrathat Doi Suthep

.gifGiven that withholding rain, or providing an excess of it and causing flooding, are favoured expressions of the Naga King's displeasure, it's understandable that offering what is most precious to the community, life itself, should have been a way of propitiating him, and anthropologists note that down to the late 19th C., the Tai of North Vietnam were still triennially sacrificing new-born male children to the ‘dragon' of the rivers. Somewhat less drastically, he is appeased today both in Laos and North Thailand by boat-racing, but we would be wrong to suppose that under the influence of modernisation, the Lord of the Underworld has retired from the popular imagination, to be condescendingly revived only for the benefit of the tourism market. There's no shortage of evidence to prove that Phaya Nak continues to be as alive to the people of up-country areas - and quite a lot in the cities - as he ever was, not by any means least of all on the banks of the mighty Mekong River.

.gifOne text providing such evidence is The Chronicle of the That Phanom Relic - That Phanom Chedi being a particularly revered Buddhist place of pilgrimage on the Thai bank of the lower Mekong. This important text contains an account of the Buddha's apocryphal visit to the region, in the course of which he met and pacified various fierce, faulty and vengeful naga lords. It also includes a delightful tale of how a character named Burichan Uay Luay (‘Pot-bellied' Burichan) founded Vientiane, again with the help of the local Serpent Lord, here named Suparna-naga. It's the final chapter, though, added to the Chronicle only fifty years ago, that best shows the continuing strength of the Naga King's hold on the region.

.gifAccording to this chapter, a Mr. Kai Huat, who lived in the market area of Nakorn Phanom, came out of his house one evening following a shower to collect rainwater, and saw a most amazing display of shooting coloured lights apparently targeting the That Phanom Chedi. A couple of days later, a novice from the temple, sent out by the abbott on an errand, came face to face (so to speak) with seven nagas who immediately transformed themselves into white-clad youths, standing in a row. Understandably astonished and disturbed, the novice turned back to his quarters, but was possessed by the chief naga, who conducted him into the presence of his abbott. No less astonished, the abbott found himself being saluted by what appeared to be a novice under his instruction, but addressed authoritatively by a seven-headed Naga Lord from Lake Anottata in the Himalayas, who told him he'd been sent by the King of the Gods, Indra, to take over the protection of the holy relic for which the That Phanom is famous. The former protectors had become corrupt, the Naga Lord explained, demanding food-offerings and sacrifices, while all he would need was an occasional perfumed glass of water. This apparently convinced the abbott, as ever since, so this recently added chapter tells us, the new protector has frequently entered the body of the novice to preach sermons and help cure the sick, "and will continue to be the guardian deity of the shrine till the end of this era of the Buddha Gotama."

.gifThis was fifty years ago, which of course is a long time in a country modernising as rapidly as Thailand, but the question as to whether the Naga King - in his Phaya Nak manifestation, among others - is alive and active can be answered with an assured affirmative, a remarkable phenomenon occurring annually bearing this out. This phenomenon - the rising at a predictable date from the bed of the Mekong River and up into the air, of hundreds of coloured bubbles, or fire-balls - is said to have taken place off the Phon Pisai district, up-river from the That Phanom temple, since time immemorial, but is now attracting curious crowds of thousands from all over the country. There are those who say these bubbles, which appear over several consecutive days and nights around the night of the full moon in October, are the product of trickery. Others think they have a natural cause. But the generally held opinion is that they're released from the bottom of the river by Phaya Nak himself.

.gifOne of the believers in this latter category is Mr. Pongpan Adireksan. He is on record as saying, "Many people, myself included, really believe the Naga is in the Mekong River…I myself have a photo of soldiers holding a serpent that is believed to be the Naga."

.gifNow it needs to be said in concluding this all-too-brief history of the Serpent Lord and his doings in the region, that we're looking here at beliefs rather than actualities, and that in assessing the Naga's importance, we need to take into account the fact that these beliefs are deeply-rooted, widely-held and of extremely long life throughout the whole of South and Southeast Asia. It follows that anyone questioning that importance should, as I say, just look around them - at the Buddhist temples, the cultural activities, the chronicles and legends referring to him, as well as at this last remarkable phenomenon and its interpretation. This should convince us that when Mr. Pongpan says he really believes the Naga lives in the Mekong River, and has a photograph of what may be this otherwise elusive figure…

.gifWell, the fact that Mr. Pongpan is a writer of fiction as well a former Thai cabinet minister shouldn't necessarily lead us to question his veracity.

Text and images © John Cadet 2005
(The writer lives in Chiang Mai and his books -The Ramakien: the Thai Epic among them - are on sale in major book shops).

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