Garudaगरुड

Garuda (गरुड) is the king of birds: a divine eagle of blinding radiance, mount of Vishnu, and the hereditary enemy of serpents. Son of the sage Kashyapa and Vinata, he is called Vainateya after his mother and Suparna, 'fair-winged', in his oldest invocations. His emblem stands guard before Vishnu temples across India and far beyond — he is the state emblem of Indonesia and the royal emblem of Thailand, a measure of how far the bird flew with Indian civilisation.

The theft of the nectar

The Mahabharata's opening book tells his story. Vinata lost a wager to her sister Kadru, mother of the serpents — a rigged bet on the colour of the divine horse Uchchaihshravas' tail, which the snakes had blackened by coiling around it — and fell into slavery with her son. The serpents named their ransom: the amrita, the nectar of immortality, kept in heaven. Garuda stormed the citadel of the gods, scattered their armies, extinguished the fire that guarded the nectar and passed the whirring discus-machine, taking the amrita without letting a drop touch his lips. Vishnu, struck by a being who could hold immortality and not drink it, offered him boons: Garuda chose to be immortal without the nectar and to perch above Vishnu himself — as his banner. He became the god's vahana; Indra recovered the nectar by stealth from the grass where Garuda set it down (the snakes, licking the sharp grass where it had rested, split their tongues); and the serpents became Garuda's lawful food.

Iconography and legacy

Garuda appears as an eagle, or as a winged man with beak and talons, hands folded in service, often kneeling before Vishnu's shrine atop his own pillar, the garuda-stambha. One of the eighteen major Puranas bears his name, its latter portion — concerned with death and the afterlife — recited at Hindu funerals. As the serpents' foe he is invoked against snakebite and poison; as Vishnu's bearer he is devotion's own vehicle, speed and power existing only to carry the god.