The Buddha’s “Taming” of the Fiery Nāga at Uruvela: Matching the nāga’s heated anger with iddhi

In previous translations of Buddhist stories, the Buddha is sometimes described as having “tamed” various nāgas, whose capacity for awakening in that lifetime is prevented by their animal birth. Yet visual narratives seem to show that artists carved such interactions with more nuance. Broadly across early Buddhist sculptures, ancient artists represented the different bodily form of nāgas in visual narratives through their unique ability to maintain cobra form and take the form of a human body. Although plot elements often determined their physical form, artists experimented with the implications of different birth statuses. For instance, in one Sanchi pillar scene featuring a nāga inhabiting the sacred fire at Uruvelā, the artist has represented the Buddha’s encounter with the nāga as the head of a majestic and fearsome cobra peering out from behind a stone shrine representing the Buddha with a singular nearby fire. Rather than “taming” the nāga there, the Buddha is written to have met the heat of the nāga’s fire, emblematic of his inability to restrain his anger, with his iddhi. Thus, Buddhist lay worshippers, recollecting this encounter in a clever artistic rendering, would be reminded of the ability of the Buddha to match “heat with heat.”