Yaksha

The road out of Parkham runs through flat country south of Mathura where the dust hangs in the air until sunset. Somewhere along it, roughly twenty-two centuries ago, eight brothers commissioned a stone man taller than any of them. He stands about two and a half metres of pale sandstone, thick through the shoulders, feet planted, one arm probably once cocked at the hip. Cut into him in Mauryan Brahmi is the name of his sculptor, Gomitaka, a pupil of Kunika, and the note that he was set up by members of a congregation devoted to Manibhadra. He is one of the oldest freestanding sculptures anywhere in India. He is not a Buddha, not a Jina, not one of the gods of the Vedic hymns. He is a yaksha, and people were bringing him flowers and coins before they were carving anyone else.

Nobody knows what the word originally meant. It turns up in the Rigveda and the Atharvaveda and again in the Brahmanas and Upanishads, and the scholarship has never settled on a single sense. Some read it as apparition, something briefly and disturbingly seen. Others take it from a root meaning to move quickly or to flash upon the eye, which would make a yaksha a thing glimpsed at the edge of vision and gone. A third line derives it from the verb to sacrifice, which would make a yaksha simply a being to whom offerings are made. All three readings survive intact in the creature that emerged, because a yaksha is exactly that: a presence you sense rather than see, quick beyond following, and hungry for gifts.

What they keep is wealth. Not coined wealth in a treasury but the older kind, the sort that lies underground and inside things: ore in the rock, water under stone, sap in the heartwood, the pot of silver buried by a grandfather and forgotten. Every substantial tree at a village crossroads could have one. Their king is Kubera, who holds the north and rules a city called Alaka somewhere behind the snowline near Kailasa, and in the Buddhist arrangement the same figure appears as Vaishravana, guardian of the northern quarter, with yakshas as his household troops. Buddhism eventually enrolled them formally among the classes of non-human beings who protect the teaching, which is a considerable promotion for a spirit that started out living in a tree.

The sculpture is where they are most solidly attested. At Bharhut and Sanchi they crowd the railings and gateways as attendants, and over the last centuries before the common era their bodies soften and the belly comes forward. The recurring type is a squat, seated male, legs splayed, a cup in one hand and a purse in the other, dressed in a dhoti knotted below the paunch and hung with heavy ornament. Kubera himself hardens into that shape and never leaves it: dwarfish, enormously bellied, clutching a money bag or a pomegranate, and in the Himalayan images squeezing a mongoose that vomits jewels. It is one of the few divine iconographies in the world that looks openly, cheerfully rich.

Manibhadra, the yaksha of the Parkham figure, was the patron of merchants who travelled. Caravan men on the trunk roads left offerings for him, and he was also asked to hold off smallpox, which suggests his followers understood perfectly well that the being who guards you on the road is the same being who can decide not to.

That double edge runs through every story about them. The best known sits in the forest books of the Mahabharata, near the end of the Pandavas’ exile. A deer makes off with a brahmin’s fire-sticks, the brothers give chase through the heat, and they end up lost and parched. Nakula reaches a lake first. A crane standing in the shallows tells him the water will turn to poison if he drinks before answering its questions. He ignores it, drinks, and dies. So do Sahadeva, Arjuna and Bhima after him, each of them finding the last one dead at the waterline and drinking anyway. Yudhishthira arrives to four corpses and a bird, and does the thing none of his brothers could manage: he stops and answers. The questions come one after another, dozens of them, on what makes a man happy, what is heavier than the earth, what news is there in the world. When he has finished, the crane drops its shape. The yaksha is Yama, god of the dead and Yudhishthira’s own divine father, and the brothers get up alive.

The Pali canon has a harsher version. At Alavi there was a yakkha named Alavaka who ate people, and the local king had bought his own life by supplying victims, first from the prisons and then, when the prisons emptied, one child per household. The Buddha spent a night in his hall. Alavaka came back and threatened to tear out his mind, rip open his heart and throw him across the Ganges if his questions went unanswered, and then asked eight of them. He got eight answers, and by morning he was a follower rather than a landlord. His parents, the tradition says, had learned those same riddles from a previous Buddha.

Their gifts and their limits come from the same source. A yaksha can vanish, take other bodies, cross distance in an instant, and open the ground where the treasure is. What it cannot do is leave. It belongs to its lake, its tree, its city gate, and its authority is entirely local; beyond that boundary it is nobody. It answers to Kubera, and Kubera is not indulgent. Kalidasa built a whole poem on that, the Meghaduta, in which an unnamed yaksha is exiled from Alaka for a year for neglecting his duties and left stranded on a hill at Ramagiri, so reduced that he can only ask a passing monsoon cloud to carry word north to his wife. He has no power over the cloud either. He simply describes the route, mountain by river by city, and hopes.

The last constraint is the strangest one. A yaksha can be stopped by a correct answer. Both of the great encounters turn on riddles rather than weapons, and in both the creature holds absolute physical advantage and gives it up the moment someone meets it on its own terms. For a spirit made of hidden things, that seems about right.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a yaksha?

A yaksha is a class of nature spirit in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain tradition, associated with the earth, trees, water and buried wealth. Yakshas act as guardians of particular places, and they can be generous or lethal depending on how people treat them. The female counterpart is the yakshi.

Who is the king of the yakshas?

Kubera, the lord of wealth, is the king of the yakshas and rules from the city of Alaka in the Himalayas. In Buddhist tradition the same figure appears as Vaishravana, guardian of the northern direction, with yakshas serving as his attendants. Kubera is usually shown as a dwarfish, heavy-bellied figure holding a money bag.

What is the Yaksha Prashna in the Mahabharata?

The Yaksha Prashna is the episode in the forest books of the Mahabharata where a yaksha disguised as a crane kills four of the Pandava brothers for drinking from its lake without permission. Yudhishthira answers the yaksha’s long series of questions instead of drinking, and the yaksha then reveals himself as Yama and restores the brothers to life.

Are yakshas good or evil?

Both, depending on the story. Yakshas are often benign guardians of trees, treasure and towns who were worshipped for wealth and safe travel, but the same texts describe yakshas who haunt the wilderness and kill travellers, such as Alavaka, the man-eating yakkha of the Pali canon whom the Buddha converted.

How old is the worship of yakshas?

Very old. The word appears in the Rigveda and Atharvaveda, and the colossal Parkham Yaksha near Mathura, inscribed in Mauryan Brahmi and set up by a congregation devoted to Manibhadra, is among the earliest freestanding sculptures in India, predating most surviving images of the major gods.

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