Garuda

Summary

Garuḍa is, in the myths of India, the king of birds, son of the sage Kaśyapa by his wife Vinatā, the bird that carries Viṣṇu, and the enemy of the serpents. His Sanskrit name is गरुड, Garuḍa; he is also called Suparṇa, "fair-feathered". His story is in the first book of the Mahābhārata.

Kaśyapa had two wives who were sisters, Kadrū and Vinatā. Kadrū asked for a thousand serpent sons; Vinatā asked for two sons stronger than her sister's. Kadrū laid a thousand eggs and Vinatā two. When Kadrū's eggs hatched after five hundred years and Vinatā's had not, she broke one out of jealousy, and out came a son whose upper half was formed and whose lower half was not. He cursed her to be a slave for five hundred years until his brother set her free, then rose into the sky and became the charioteer of the sun. Then the sisters wagered on the colour of the horse Uccaiḥśravas, which had come out of the churning of the ocean: Vinatā said it was white all over, Kadrū said its tail was black, and they agreed that the loser would be the other's slave. Kadrū ordered her serpent sons to turn themselves into black hairs in the horse's tail; they did, Vinatā lost, and she became a slave.

Then the second egg hatched and out came Garuḍa, blazing like fire, so that the gods took him for Agni and were afraid. At his enslaved mother's bidding he carried the serpents on his back; he asked her why he had to serve them, and once he knew, he asked the serpents the price of her freedom. Bring us the drink of immortality, they said. He flew to heaven, fought the gods who guarded the drink and beat them, put out the fire around it with the water of rivers he drank with many mouths, passed between the blades of a wheel spinning like a razor, killed two serpents that guarded it, and took the drink without tasting it. Viṣṇu met him on the way and was pleased that he had not drunk; he granted him to stand above him and to be immortal without the drink, asked him to be his mount, and set him on his banner. Indra struck him with the thunderbolt and he felt no harm, but he let fall a single feather in honour of the sage from whose bones the thunderbolt was made, and so he is called fair-feathered. Then he made a pact with Indra: Garuḍa would set the drink before the serpents, Indra would take it while they were not watching, and the serpents would be Garuḍa's food. He set it on kuśa grass and told the serpents: bathe, then drink, and from today my mother is free. They went to bathe, Indra carried the drink back to heaven, and the serpents came back to find nothing. They licked the grass it had stood on, their tongues split in two, and the grass became holy.

The idea the story turns on is a son who buys his mother's freedom with the drink of immortality and does not drink it. A single deceit, black hairs in a horse's tail, made the mother a slave and set the sisters' sons, the bird and the serpents, against each other. Garuḍa did not end the slavery by strength alone but by keeping a bargain: he carried the drink and paid the price, and then another deceit sent it back to heaven, so the serpents lost the drink, got split tongues, and became food for the bird who freed his mother. Each was left with what was his: immortality for the gods, freedom for Vinatā, and enmity between bird and serpent.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, a reading proposed on the method. Without its final short vowel, Garuḍa is garuḍ: g, r and ḍ in order, which is Arabic jarada. Sanskrit g is Arabic j, and the retroflex ḍ is d. In Lane, jarada al-jarādu al-arḍ is "the locusts stripped the land of all its herbage, ate what was upon it", and the locust is named from this, while al-jārūd is a year of drought, "as though it destroyed men". The Indian grammarians derive the name from a verb meaning to swallow: for them he is "the devourer". On this reading Garuḍa is the one who strips bare whatever he meets, which is what the story makes him: he eats the people of the Niṣāda town by thousands and is still hungry, then eats an elephant and a tortoise, and then the serpents become his food.

Linguistic Root

Monier-Williams derives Garuḍa from the verb gṝ, "devourer", and suggests the bird was perhaps first identified with the all-consuming fire of the sun's rays. Apte analyses the name two ways: from garut, wing, with the verb of flying, or from gṝ with the suffix -uḍa.

Lane gives jarada al-jarādu al-arḍ, the locusts ate what was on the land; the locust "so called from stripping the ground"; al-jārūd, a year of drought; tajarrada, said of a horse, it outstripped the others; and ajrad, a horse that outstrips others and parts from them by its swiftness. Swallowing itself appears in the neighbouring roots: jaraʿa al-māʾ, he swallowed the water, and jarjara, he poured water down his throat so that it gurgled. Taking the whole name, it is jarada, eating until nothing is left; taking the root the Indian grammarians give, gṝ, j and r are the nucleus of swallowing in Arabic as in Sanskrit.

The sound correspondence is regular: Arabic j is g in the other languages, r is r, d is d, and the final vowel is the stem vowel. The project's Hindu essay does not read Garuḍa's name, so this reading is made on the method.

The Mahābhārata gives the name a third explanation: when the bird carried off the branch of the great tree with the sages hanging from it, the sages said, since he flies bearing a heavy load, let him be called Garuḍa, "bearer of heavy weight".

Key Mythic Narratives

The road to the drink

Vinatā told her son to eat on his way the people of a Niṣāda town by the sea, and forbade him to kill a Brahmin. He stood across their roads and opened his mouth, and they went into it by thousands; a Brahmin went in with them and burned his throat like an ember, and Garuḍa let him out together with his wife. He was still hungry, so his father showed him an elephant and a tortoise in a lake, two brothers who had quarrelled over dividing their inheritance and cursed each other. He took them in his claws and alighted on a branch of a huge tree, which broke; hanging from it head down he saw tiny sages, the Vālakhilyas, so he held the branch in his beak to keep them from falling and flew with it until the sages agreed to leave it, dropped it on an uninhabited mountain, and then ate the elephant and the tortoise.

The churning of the ocean in the Mahābhārata

Before Garuḍa's story the Mahābhārata tells the churning of the ocean from which the horse Uccaiḥśravas came: the serpent Ananta pulled up Mount Mandara at Viṣṇu's bidding, the serpent Vāsuki served as the rope, the asuras held its head and the gods its tail, and when the poison came out Śiva drank it at Brahmā's request.

Helper of the serpent who holds the earth

At the end of the story Brahmā gives Garuḍa as a helper to Śeṣa, the eldest and most devout of the serpents, who left his brothers and carries the earth on his head from beneath. The bird is the enemy of the wicked serpents and the companion of the serpent who holds up the world.

Garuḍa in the Rāmāyaṇa and Kāliya

In the Rāmāyaṇa Sumati, King Sagara's second wife, is Garuḍa's sister, so he is the maternal uncle of her sixty thousand sons. When the sage Kapila burned them to ashes, Garuḍa told Sagara's grandson Aṃśumān that the ashes of his uncles could be purified only by the water of the Gaṅgā coming down from heaven. Rāmāyaṇa, Bāla Kāṇḍa 38, 41. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa the serpents used to offer Garuḍa a share, and the serpent Kāliya ate it; Garuḍa struck him with his wing, and Kāliya fled to a lake in the Yamunā that Garuḍa could not enter because of a sage's curse, until Kṛṣṇa drove him out and made him safe from Garuḍa by the marks of his feet on his heads.

Symbolic Reading

Neither Hindu essay reads Garuḍa. Monier-Williams suggests that the bird was first an image of the sun's all-consuming fire, and the story has something close to this: when he came out of the egg the gods took him for Agni because of his blaze, and his brother Aruṇa is the charioteer of the morning sun.

The story itself holds the life of a human household: two wives who are sisters and jealous of each other, a wager in which freedom is staked, a son who buys his mother out of servitude for a debt, and two brothers who quarrel over their inheritance until they become an elephant and a tortoise fighting in a lake. The enmity of bird and serpent begins in the story as a quarrel between co-wives.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Ṛgveda 4.26–27 a falcon, śyena, carries Soma down from the height of heaven, the archer Kṛśānu shoots at it, and a feather falls from the bird. Garuḍa carries the drink of immortality from heaven, Indra strikes him with the thunderbolt, and he lets a feather fall. The drink, the bird, the blow and the feather are in the old hymn and in the epic alike.

In the North Odin, in eagle shape, carries the mead of poetry from the giant Suttungr's house with the giant chasing him, as told under Kvasir. The Sumerian essay compares Anzu with Garuḍa: Anzu is a bird who steals the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil while he bathes, and the gods refuse one after another to fight him. Garuḍa defeats the gods and takes the drink, and Indra then takes it from the serpents while they bathe. In both stories the bath is the moment of the theft.

The name of the Iranian Simurgh in the Avesta is "the bird Saēna", originally the falcon itself, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica says it is the same word as Sanskrit śyena. In the Pahlavi Mēnōg ī Xrad the Simurgh's nest is on the tree of many seeds, and when it alights it breaks a thousand shoots and their seeds fall. Garuḍa alights on a branch of a huge tree and it breaks under him.

In the North Þjazi, in eagle's plumage, takes the apples by which the gods keep their youth, and they come back by Loki's trick as the drink of immortality came back by Indra's, but Þjazi takes them for himself; see Þjazi.