Kinnara

The lute is made of beryl, with gilding along its trim from the gold of the Jambū River, and the moment it is struck the world stops behaving. Mount Sumeru sways. Himavat and Gandhamādana lean and lurch like men who have been drinking. Inside the Buddha’s assembly the gods put down their own instruments and come nearer, and then every monk, nun, layman and laywoman in the gathering gets to their feet without deciding to, and shakes, and bends, and begins to dance. Even the great elders cannot stop. Mahākāśyapa, ascetic, frail, the most venerable man in the room, is hopping about like a child. Only the bodhisattvas keep their seats.

The player is Druma, king of the kinnaras, arrived from Gandhamādana with eighty-four thousand musicians behind him. When a bodhisattva asks Mahākāśyapa how a man of his attainments comes to be dancing, the old monk answers without much embarrassment. In a hurricane, he says, the forests and the mountains cannot hold their places either.

That scene sits in a Buddhist sūtra old enough to have reached China by the end of the second century, and it is the best short answer to what a kinnara is. Not a god. Not a demon. A musician, and the finest one available.

The name is a question. Kiṃnara means something like “what sort of man is that?”, and the old Sanskrit lexicographers were not being kind: kim is the interrogative used with a curl of the lip, the way one might say “man, of a sort.” The synonym lists in the Amarakośa pile up beside it, kimpuruṣa, mayu, and turaṅgavadana, which simply means horse-faced. That is what a kinnara looked like to a Sanskrit dictionary. A human figure with a horse’s head, or on some readings a horse’s body carrying a human one, filed among the minor divine races that serve Kubera, lord of wealth, in his mountain court. The epics scatter them across exactly the country you would expect: the slopes of Himavat, the flanks of Gandhamādana, Kailāsa, the lotus lakes above the treeline, always singing.

Go east and the animal changes. In Buddhist art and across Southeast Asia the kinnara loses the horse and gains a bird, and the kinnarī becomes one of the most beautiful figures in Asian sculpture: a woman to the waist, and below it feathered thighs, a fanned tail, and the long scaled legs and gripping toes of a bird. A black stone panel carved in Bihar or Bengal around the turn of the twelfth century shows one of them ringing a small bell, wings folded, entirely composed. A ninth-century bronze finial from central Java carries another. The two descriptions never reconciled and nobody seems to have minded. What the traditions agree on is the voice.

They are not, in most of their stories, doing anything at all. That is the point of them. In one Pali birth story the kinnara Canda and his wife Candā live on a silver mountain called Canda-pabbata, the Mountain of the Moon, and spend the rainy months up on the heights, coming down only when the heat arrives. They rub themselves with perfume. They eat the pollen out of flowers and dress in gauze made of them. They swing in the creepers for no reason but pleasure. Reaching a stream, they bathe, scatter blossom on the water, spread a couch of flowers on a bank of sand as white as a beaten silver plate, and lie down; and he takes up a length of bamboo and plays, and sings in what the text calls a honey voice, while she dances beside him with her hands moving softly and sings the same song back.

A king of Benares, hunting alone, hears it and comes quietly through the trees to look. He wants the wife. So he shoots the husband.

What follows is the most famous kinnara passage in the Pali canon, and it is famous because of her. Canda, dying, says nothing about his own pain except that it is nothing beside the thought of hers. Candā, when she understands, climbs to the hilltop and curses the king in five verses, wishing on his mother and his wife precisely the grief he has just handed her, and when he offers to make her his queen she tells him she would rather cut her own throat. He walks away, unmoved and slightly bored. She carries her husband’s body up to the flat ground, lays his head in her lap, and taunts the gods for being absent, asking whether they are travelling, or asleep, or simply dead. The throne of Sakka grows hot beneath him. He comes down disguised as a brahmin, sprinkles water from a pot, and the poison lets go; Canda wakes with no scar and no memory of the wound. Sakka’s parting instruction is the moral of the whole species. Stay on your mountain. Do not come down where men walk.

The Buddha told that story, the tradition says, to explain to his own father why Yasodharā had been faithful to him through everything, and to say that she had been faithful in earlier lives as well, when they were both animals on a silver hill.

The other great kinnara tale is the one that got carved into a mountain of stone. Manoharā, youngest daughter of the kinnara king Druma, comes down on the full moon to bathe in a lotus pool with five hundred kinnarī maidens, and a hunter is waiting. In the Sanskrit version he binds her with the amoghapāśa, the Infallible Noose; in the Pali and Mahāvastu tellings he takes her with statements of truth, and she surrenders the crest jewel that lets her fly, because without it she cannot leave anyway. She is given to Prince Sudhana, who falls in love with her at sight in a passage of dizzy, undignified prose about arrows and moths and monkeys. Later, while he is at war, the court brahmin decides she is bad luck and arranges to have her burned. She gets her jewel back and goes home. Sudhana follows on foot for seven years, seven months and seven days, learns the speech of animals from a hermit, crosses a river of fire, and is made to pick his wife out of a line of seven identical women, which he manages by the ring on her finger.

Almost every story in which a mortal loves a supernatural woman ends badly. This one does not. It ends with the two of them going home together, and it was popular enough to be told in Sanskrit, Pali, Khotanese, Chinese and Tibetan, painted on the wall of a cave at Ajanta in the fifth century, and spread across the first twenty relief panels on the lowest terrace of Borobudur, where a pilgrim walking clockwise round the monument meets it before anything else.

Their powers are all of one kind. They fly, by means of a jewel or an ornament that can be taken off them. They live very long and very high up, in air too thin and cold for hunting parties, on mountains that are also the addresses of gods. Their music does not persuade, it compels, and it works on the enlightened as readily as on the drunk. Against this, they are catchable. A noose holds them. A truthful sentence holds them. And a man with a bow and a bad idea can bring one down out of a tree while it is singing to its wife.

They can be shot. That is the flaw in the whole arrangement, and the stories know it, which is why they keep ending the same way, with the kinnaras going back up the mountain and the humans standing at the bottom of it, listening.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a kinnara?

A kinnara is a celestial musician of Hindu and Buddhist mythology, living in the Himalayan mountains and serving in the courts of Kubera and of the Buddha. The name in Sanskrit means roughly “what sort of man?”, and kinnaras are famous both for their music and for the devotion of kinnara couples to one another.

Is a kinnara half-bird or half-horse?

Both, depending on the tradition. Sanskrit lexicons and the Indian epics describe the kinnara as a being with a human figure and a horse’s head, and list horse-faced among its synonyms, while Buddhist art and Southeast Asian tradition depict the kinnara and kinnarī with a human head and torso joined to a bird’s wings, tail and legs.

Where do kinnaras live?

Kinnaras live in the high northern mountains: Himavat, Mount Gandhamādana, Kailāsa and the lotus lakes above them, in the region ruled by Kubera. In one Pali birth story a kinnara couple lives on a silver peak called the Mountain of the Moon, staying on the heights through the rains and descending only in the hot season.

What is the story of Manohara and Sudhana?

Manoharā is a kinnarī princess, daughter of the kinnara king Druma, who is caught by a hunter at a lotus pool and given to Prince Sudhana, who marries her. Driven from his kingdom by a hostile brahmin, she flies home, and Sudhana pursues her for seven years, seven months and seven days, passing a series of tests before her father allows them to return together. It is one of the few myths in which a marriage between a mortal and a supernatural being ends happily, and it is carved across the first twenty relief panels of Borobudur.

How powerful is kinnara music?

In The Questions of the Kinnara King Druma, the kinnara king plays a beryl lute before the Buddha and the mountains themselves stagger, while every listener in the assembly, including senior monks such as Mahākāśyapa, stands up and dances helplessly. Only bodhisattvas who have reached the stage of irreversibility are able to remain seated.

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