Sheshaशेष

Shesha is the serpent on whom Vishnu sleeps. He floats on the causal ocean between one age and the next, coiled, with a canopy of a thousand hoods above the sleeping god; and beneath the world he carries the earth and the lower regions, which the Bhagavata says rest on a single one of those hoods like a mustard seed.

He is also Ananta, the endless, and Adishesha, the first Shesha.

The name is the interesting part. Śeṣa means remainder — what is left over. When the worlds are withdrawn at the close of a cycle and everything is dissolved, what does not dissolve is Shesha, and the next creation begins on top of him. He is, precisely, the tradition's word for the part that is not destroyed.

What he does is hold things up, without pause. He is the bed, the canopy, the seat, the umbrella, the floor, and in Vaikuntha the throne. Almost every image of him is an image of somebody else being comfortable.

He is held to have been born twice as a man, and both times into the same work: Lakshmana, who stays awake for fourteen years so that Rama may sleep, and Balarama, the elder brother with the plough. The tradition's serpent of support keeps being reborn as the brother who takes the weight.

A naga among the nagas, and the one who left. His birth is told in the Mahabharata's Astika Parva, the same passage that produces Garuda. Kashyapa has two wives: Kadru, who asks for a thousand serpent sons, and Vinata, who asks for two who will surpass them. Shesha is the eldest of Kadru's thousand.

Then comes the wager over the tail of the horse Uchchaihshravas, and Kadru orders her sons to wind themselves into it and darken it so that she will win. Some refuse and are cursed; and Shesha, disgusted by his mother's deceit and his brothers' compliance, leaves them altogether. He performs austerities so severe that Brahma tells him to ask for anything, and what he asks is that his mind remain steady in righteousness. Brahma gives him the office of holding up the earth, which had been unsteady.

That is the character in one episode: the naga who would not take part, whose reward is a weight.

The Garuda connection. His brothers' deceit enslaves Vinata and sets Garuda on the raid for the nectar; that page tells the other half. Garuda eats serpents by Indra's grant, and Shesha is a serpent — and the tradition simply does not stage a fight between them, Shesha having left the family before the enmity was contracted.

Ananta and the cosmology. The Bhagavata's fifth book places him below the lowest of the seven patalas, and gives the mustard-seed image. He should not be confused with Vasuki, who is a naga king that gets used — as the churning rope, as Shiva's necklace — where Shesha is the ground everything stands on.

The fire at the end. At the close of a kalpa, Shesha's mouths emit Sankarshana's fire, and the worlds burn. The one who carries is the one who ends. The pairing is deliberate, and it is why samhara is a withdrawal rather than a catastrophe.

Sankarshana. In Pancharatra theology the four vyuhas are Vasudeva, Sankarshana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha; Sankarshana is Balarama, and Balarama is Shesha. The serpent is folded into the highest Vaishnava metaphysics rather than left as scenery.

The canopy. The most recognisable form: a coiled serpent with many hoods spread as an umbrella over a seated or reclining figure. A thousand in the texts; five, seven or nine in the sculpture, because a thousand cannot be carved.

Anantashayana. Vishnu reclining on the coils, one hand beneath his head, Lakshmi at his feet, the lotus rising from his navel with Brahma seated in it. Among the great compositions of Indian art, and the form in which most people meet Shesha — usually without looking at him.

Holding the earth. In Puranic cosmological diagrams, a serpent beneath the world-mountain.

In human form. As Sankarshana he is a fair man with a plough and a pestle, serpent hoods behind his head — the same attributes as Balarama, which is the iconographic statement that the two are one.

With Patanjali. The grammarian and the author of the Yoga Sutras, held by tradition to be Shesha incarnate, is shown half human and half serpent, coiled below the waist, hands joined, hoods above. The image is standard in yoga institutions and at Chidambaram, and it appears in the verse recited before practice in many schools. The Nataraja page notes that historians do not accept the identification of the grammarian with the yoga author; that caution applies here too.

Not Vasuki, and not Kaliya. Vasuki is the churning rope and the snake at Shiva's neck; Kaliya is the serpent Krishna dances on in the Yamuna. Three different nagas, constantly interchanged.

Adishesha / Ananta. The primordial serpent; the names are used interchangeably.

Sankarshana. The Pancharatra vyuha. Saṅkarṣaṇa means "the one who draws together" — from the transfer of the embryo from Devaki to Rohini, and from the drawing-in at the end of an age.

Balarama. Krishna's elder brother; Shesha descended. At his death the Bhagavata has a white serpent leave his mouth and go into the sea.

Lakshmana. Rama's younger brother. In the same Vaishnava scheme Bharata and Shatrughna are Vishnu's discus and conch.

Patanjali. By tradition, Shesha born among men to give the world grammar and yoga.

Ramanuja. Sri Vaishnava tradition holds Ramanuja (traditionally 1017–1137) to be Shesha incarnate, which is why he is Lakshmana Muni and Ilaya Perumal. For a tradition to make its greatest theologian the serpent of support is a considered piece of theology, not a compliment.

Among the Ashtanaga. One of the eight great nagas — with Vasuki, Takshaka, Karkotaka, Padma, Mahapadma, Shankhapala and Kulika — invoked at Naga Panchami.

Not Ananta the Vishnu epithet. Ananta is also an ordinary epithet of Vishnu himself, and the name of Ananta Padmanabhaswamy refers to the serpent in the composition rather than to a separate deity of that temple.

Leaving his mother. Told in Origins, and the foundation of everything else. Shesha's first recorded act is a refusal, and it costs him his family.

The steadying of the earth. Brahma gives him the earth because it was unstable. In some accounts he asks to be given the place beneath, and goes down through a fissure to the position he has held since. Earthquakes are explained across much of India as Shesha shifting his hoods, and the explanation is still in ordinary speech.

The mustard seed. The most quoted line about him: the whole of the worlds rests on one of his thousand hoods, and on that hood it is like a mustard seed. The point is not that he is strong. It is that the thing which seems to us to be everything is, to what actually carries it, negligible.

The sleep between the worlds. Between dissolution and creation Vishnu sleeps on him. The Ratri page carries what happens when somebody needs to wake him.

Balarama's departure. At the end of the Yadava line, Balarama sits in meditation by the sea, and a white serpent with a thousand hoods comes out of his mouth and goes into the water, received by the ocean and the nagas. It is the plainest statement in the corpus that Balarama was Shesha, and one of the quietest deaths in Indian literature.

Patanjali's descent. The tradition says Shesha wished to be born among men to teach grammar, and fell as a small serpent into the cupped palms (añjali) of a woman named Gonika who had prayed for a son — pata, fallen, hence Patañjali. A folk etymology, and stated as one.

And the name. When the gods had divided everything at the first sacrifice, what was left over was Shesha. The tradition's ordinary word for a remainder became the name of the one thing a dissolution cannot dispose of, and there is a good deal of metaphysics packed into that.

Naga Panchami. The fifth of the bright fortnight of Shravana, the principal serpent observance of the Indian year. Milk is offered at snake holes and naga stones, serpents are drawn at the door, and the eight great nagas are named — Shesha or Ananta first. Digging and ploughing are avoided.

Ananta Chaturdashi. The fourteenth of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada, and specifically his. The Ananta Vrata is kept: a thread of fourteen knots, dyed with turmeric, worshipped and tied on the arm — fourteen for the fourteen worlds he carries — and traditionally kept for fourteen years. The Mahabharata has Krishna prescribe it to Yudhishthira during the exile. In Maharashtra and Gujarat the same day now closes Ganeshotsav with the immersion, and the two observances share the date.

In the Anantashayana temples, as part of the composition rather than separately.

In serpent shrines. The naga stones under trees across India, the sarpa kavu groves of Kerala and the serpent shrines of Karnataka and the Konkan belong to a broad and very old stratum of serpent worship, into which Shesha is the Vaishnava entry point. The Aranyani page carries the groves.

In yoga. The verse to Patanjali — yogena cittasya padena vācāṃ malaṃ śarīrasya ca vaidyakena — opens practice in many schools worldwide, and it addresses him as the serpent.

At the naga rite temples. Kukke Subramanya (Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka) is the principal site for rites concerning serpents and is enormously attended. DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes, including about the astrological conditions such rites are undertaken for.

His presence is architectural — he is in the sanctum of a great many temples, holding somebody up.

Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) — the deity reclines on Anantha, whose hoods shelter his head, and the image is long enough to be viewed through three separate doors. The best-known Anantashayana in India.

Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam (Tiruchirappalli district, Tamil Nadu) — Ranganatha reclining on Adishesha; the largest functioning Hindu temple complex in the world.

Ananthapura Lake Temple (Kasaragod district, Kerala) — built in the middle of a lake and held to be Padmanabhaswamy's original seat.

Dashavatara Temple, Deogarh (Lalitpur district, Uttar Pradesh) — the Gupta Sheshashayi Vishnu panel, sixth century, among the finest reliefs in India.

Udayagiri, Badami, Aihole and Mahabalipuram carry early Anantashayana panels.

Kukke Subramanya (Karnataka) — the great serpent-rite temple, where Subrahmanya is worshipped with Vasuki.

Sheshnag (Anantnag district, Jammu and Kashmir) — the lake on the Amarnath route. The district's name is read both from ananta nag, the endless spring — Kashmiri nag means a spring — and from the serpent; the two readings are not exclusive.

Chidambaram (Tamil Nadu) — the Patanjali shrine, where he is worshipped in half-serpent form beside Vyaghrapada.

A god defined by remaining. Almost every deity here is defined by an act. Shesha is defined by a residue: he is what is there when the acts are over. That the tradition personified the leftover, gave it a thousand heads, and made the next universe begin on top of it is one of its more startling moves, and it is why the name is worth translating every time it is used.

Support as an office. He holds the earth, he is Vishnu's bed, his shade, his seat, his sandals and his throne. There is no point at which Shesha does anything for himself. Indian religion has a great many gods who act; it has one whose entire content is bearing the weight of somebody else's action — and it thought well enough of that to give the office to its greatest theologian, to two of its best-loved brothers, and to the man credited with its grammar and its yoga.

The mustard seed, and proportion. The most useful sentence about him. It is not a boast about size but a statement about scale — that what is total from inside is small from underneath — and it is the closest Puranic cosmology comes to saying something a modern reader recognises immediately.

The one who would not take part. His first act is to refuse his mother's deceit and walk away from a thousand brothers. The tradition then makes him the foundation of the world. Integrity first, and the weight afterwards — and that sequence is what distinguishes him from the nagas generally, who are ambivalent, dangerous, and bargained with.

Carrying and ending in one figure. The mouths that hold the worlds up are the mouths that burn them. A tradition that wanted a comforting god of support would not have added that, and the pairing makes the same point the Trimurti page does about dissolution: what ends things is not the enemy of what sustains them.

And the brothers. Lakshmana and Balarama are both brothers who carry, who are loyal to the point of self-erasure, and who are the same serpent. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata do not know about each other; the Vaishnava reading that made both of them Shesha noticed that the two epics contain the same person — and gave him a name that means what is left over.