Garuda

Garuda is the great eagle (or eagle-man) who serves as the mount (vahana) of Vishnu, and the king of birds. His birth-story is one of bondage and release: his mother Vinata is enslaved through a wager to her sister Kadru, the mother of the snakes (nagas), and Garuda wins her freedom by fetching the amrita, the nectar of immortality, from the gods, past fire and guardians that cannot stop him. Even Indra's thunderbolt cannot wound him, and when Vishnu offers him a boon he asks to be immortal without drinking the nectar and to fly above Vishnu's banner. Because of this myth snakes are both his food and his hereditary enemies, and Garuda is invoked against snakebite and poison.

Garuda's myth reaches its fullest early telling in the Mahabharata's Astika Parva, and some scholars trace his figure back further still, to hints in the Rigveda of a great solar bird called Garutman, though the connection between this Vedic hint and the fully formed epic and Puranic Garuda remains a matter of scholarly reconstruction rather than a documented, unbroken line. Garuda's enmity with snakes is itself given a genealogical origin in the epic: his mother Vinata and the mother of the nagas, Kadru, are sisters, so the eagle and the serpents he preys upon are, in the myth's own logic, first cousins locked in a rivalry that began generations before Garuda himself was born.

Garuda's reach is one of the plainer measures of how far Indian religion spread through Southeast Asia. He is a protective figure in Buddhism as well as Hinduism, and he appears today on the national emblems of Indonesia and Thailand and gives his name to Indonesia's national airline, in countries whose populations are now largely Muslim and Buddhist, so that the eagle of Vishnu survives as a state symbol long after the religious context that produced him changed. In Bali, where Hinduism remains the majority faith, Garuda is a living presence in temple art and dance. The image of the divine bird locked in eternal struggle with the serpent, sky against underworld, sun against water, is among the most widespread in Asian religious art.

Indonesia's national emblem, adopted in 1950 and known as Garuda Pancasila, shows the bird bearing on its chest a shield inscribed with the country's five founding principles, while Thailand has used a version of Garuda, known there as Phra Khrut Pha, as the seal of royal and governmental authority since the early Chakri dynasty in the late eighteenth century, stamped on official documents and government buildings across the country. Both usages keep Vishnu's mount at the very centre of modern national symbolism in two of the countries where Hindu-Buddhist civilisation once flourished most richly, long after the state religion of each had become predominantly Muslim or Buddhist respectively.