Vahana

Outside the sanctum of a Shiva temple a bull lies in the open, forelegs folded under him, facing the closed door. Rain has pitted his back. Generations of palms have polished his shoulders and the crown of his head to a low shine. He never goes in. The god is inside in the dark, and the bull waits out in the daylight, and that waiting is the whole of his office.

The Sanskrit is blunt about what he is. Vahana comes from the root that gives “to carry” and “to draw,” and it names the thing that does the carrying: the animal a god rides, or stands upon, or keeps at the ankle like a signature. Nearly every figure in the Hindu pantheon has one. Vishnu has the eagle Garuda. Indra has the white elephant Airavata. Ganesha has a mouse, Durga a lion, Yama a black buffalo, Brahma and Sarasvati a goose, Varuna and Ganga the makara that haunts the river mouths. The pairing is not decoration. In a broken image whose arms have snapped off and whose emblems are gone, the animal underfoot is often the only thing left that still says who this is.

As a class the vahanas make a small zoo with no shared anatomy. Some are ordinary animals at ordinary scale, a rat with its whiskers forward, a peacock with the tail closed. Some are impossible. Airavata comes with four tusks and sometimes many more, white as a cloud before rain. Uchchaihshravas, the horse that rose out of the churning of the ocean, carries seven heads. The makara has no fixed body at all, and carvers have given it a crocodile’s jaw, an elephant’s trunk, a fish’s tail and a lion’s forefeet in whatever combination the doorway asked for. Scale is elastic in the same way. The mouse beneath Ganesha is mouse-sized in one carving and the size of a pony in the next, because the image has to hold him and the arithmetic of weight was never the point.

The system is younger than the gods inside it. The Vedic hymns give their deities teams and chariots rather than mounts, Indra behind his bay horses, Agni with a ram, and the neat one-god-one-animal arrangement that fills later temple walls took centuries to settle into place. A sandstone column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh, raised around 113 BCE by a Greek ambassador named Heliodorus who had become a devotee of Vasudeva, was topped with a Garuda. That is the bird as a standard, an emblem lifted on a pole, well before it is a saddle. By the Kushan and early Gupta centuries the animals have moved under the gods and stayed there. Even then the joins show. The lion-riding warrior goddess of that period cannot be securely named as Durga in any text or inscription of her own time, and her form may owe something to Nana, the lion-borne goddess who travelled east out of the Hellenistic world with Mesopotamian Inanna standing behind her.

The clearest account of how a mount is acquired sits in the first book of the Mahabharata. Garuda’s mother Vinata lost a wager to her co-wife Kadru and fell into servitude to Kadru’s serpent children, who set the price of her freedom at the amrita, the drink of deathlessness, held by the gods. Garuda went and took it. He came through a wheel of turning blades and a wall of fire, put down the guardians, and carried the vessel away without swallowing a drop. Vishnu, watching that restraint, offered him a boon. Garuda asked for two. He asked to be deathless without drinking, and he asked to sit above Vishnu. Both were granted, and Garuda gave himself in return, which is why the eagle who carries the god also rides the god’s banner, higher than the head of the one he serves.

Other mounts arrive as prisoners. The Puranic literature tells of Krauncha, a celestial musician who trod on the foot of a sage and was cursed into the body of an enormous rodent, and who then went through the fields and the hermitages wrecking whatever he touched until Ganesha dropped a noose over him and set him under the weight he had spent his freedom avoiding. The accounts disagree about which text tells this first. The shape of it is familiar enough across the tradition: an adversary is beaten, then kept, and the keeping is the sentence. A god who rides what he defeated is making a point that a god who merely defeated something cannot make.

In the working life of a temple the vahana is everywhere before the god is. It sits on the flagstaff at the entrance, the dhvajastambha, so that anyone crossing the boundary reads the animal and knows whose ground this is. In some plans it is given a pavilion of its own. On a festival night the bronze that leaves the sanctum is lashed to a carved wooden mount, and the bearers get their shoulders under the poles and lift, and the whole assembly goes out into the street through camphor smoke and drums and crushed jasmine, the wood creaking under a load it was built to take. A different mount comes out on a different night. Garuda one evening, the goose the next, then an elephant, then a horse, until the god has been carried through the town on everything capable of carrying him.

What the animal supplies is reach. Garuda gives Vishnu the open sky and a speed that nothing overtakes. Airavata gives Indra the clouds and the rain that falls out of them. The makara gives Ganga the whole river from the melt to the delta. The buffalo gives Yama the unhurried certainty of a thing that arrives regardless. There is a second gift underneath the first, which is that strength ridden is strength governed: the bull’s virility, the lion’s ferocity and the rat’s appetite for anything it can reach have all been made to lie down and be sat upon.

The limits are built into the arrangement. A vahana is defined by the one it carries and seldom acts alone, and on the occasions when it does, as when Garuda goes hunting nagas, the story stops being about the god and the animal has effectively become a deity with temples and festivals of its own, which is exactly what happened to Garuda and to Nandi. The scheme is also far less orderly than the wall charts suggest. Sarasvati rides a goose in one tradition and a peacock in another. Lakshmi is given an owl, or a pair of elephants, or nothing. A single deity may hold several mounts and change between them by region, by sect and by century. The lists do not agree. And the oldest hard evidence, that pillar at Besnagar with a bird on top of it, is a standard rather than a saddle, which suggests the god was being identified by his animal long before anyone thought to put him on its back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vahana in Hindu mythology?

A vahana is the animal that carries a Hindu deity, from the Sanskrit for “that which carries” or “that which pulls.” It can be shown as a mount the god rides, as a creature standing at the god’s feet, or as an emblem raised on a banner. In art it works as an identifier: the animal tells you which deity you are looking at even when the figure’s other attributes are damaged or missing.

Which animals are the vahanas of the major Hindu gods?

Vishnu rides the eagle Garuda, Shiva the bull, Indra the white elephant Airavata, and Ganesha a mouse. Durga rides a lion, Yama a black buffalo, Brahma and Sarasvati a goose, and Varuna and Ganga the composite makara. The assignments are not fixed everywhere, and a single deity can be given different mounts in different regions and periods.

How did Garuda become the vahana of Vishnu?

The first book of the Mahabharata tells how Garuda seized the amrita, the nectar of immortality, to buy his mother Vinata out of servitude to the serpents, and carried it off without drinking any of it. Vishnu offered him a boon for that restraint, and Garuda asked to be immortal without the nectar and to be positioned above Vishnu. Vishnu granted both, and Garuda became his mount and the emblem on his banner.

Are vahanas worshipped on their own?

Some are. Garuda and the bull Nandi both accumulated their own mythology, their own temples and their own festivals, and are venerated independently of the gods they carry. Most vahanas remain subordinate figures defined entirely by the deity they serve.

Where do you see a vahana in a Hindu temple?

The mount appears on the dhvajastambha, the flagstaff standing outside the entrance, so it is the first thing a visitor reads on arriving. In Shiva temples the bull is placed on a platform in front of the sanctum, facing the shrine door, and some temples build a dedicated pavilion for the vehicle. During festivals the processional image of the deity is carried through the streets fixed to a carved wooden vahana.

Related Entries

Garuda, Airavata, Uchchaihshravas, Makara, Hamsa, Vishnu, Shiva, Ganesha, Durga, Indra, Brahma, Sarasvati, Yama, Naga