Stephen Hodge wrote:

> Thank you for your reply. I'm not interested in the symbolism
> attributed to snakes nor the legendary anthropomorphic nagas, but
> I am trying to ascertain i) what names are given to the
> individual snakes in the fairly common set of four, and ii) what
> actual snakes they correspond to.

Hello Stephen,

I have now finished examining all the occurrences of
ka.t.thamukha, puutimukha etc. in the Pali, Atthakathaa and
.Tiikaa. My conclusion is that there is no evidence at all that
the commentators thought of these as specifying any actual
snakes. The ka.t.thamukha, for example, appears to be simply any
kind of snake whose venom makes one's body stiff, but cannot be
limited to any particular snake of this sort. The closest the
commentators come to making an identification is in the SA
passage that I appended to my last post. But this only comes when
the commentator gets down to the sub-sub-species and consists
only of ".....like a tree-snake". If even a sub-sub-species can
only be identified in this vague manner, it seems unlikely that
the commentators intended any greater degree of specificity for
the main species.

> All too often with flora and faunna, one encounters unhelpful
> glosses in dictionaries etc "a kind of snake" etc.

Sometimes it can't be helped. Even ancient dictionaries like the
Abhidhaanappadiipikaa and its .tiikaa will sometimes just say "a
kind of bear" or "a small tree". The best one can then hope for
is that the word will have survived (with unchanged meaning) in
Sinhalese or some modern Indian language.

> I'm translating some material from Tibetan and can reconstruct
> the Sanskrit for three of the four: aa`sii-vi.saa,
> d.r.s.ti-vi.saa and naaga -- there is a fourth which is puzzling.
> In the Lanakavatara-sutra, mention is made of the first two
> above with bhujaga and ghora as the other two, although some
> people have incorrectly understood these as epithets.

You perhaps will have noticed in the SA passage in my last post
that there is a tetrad comprising:

1) da.t.thaviso
2) di.t.thaviso
3) phu.t.thaviso
4) vaataviso

This would seem to partly overlap with the ones you name above,
but again there is no evidence that the Pali commentator
understood them to be actual snakes. They are merely the
sub-divisions of the main groups. An aggimukha da.t.thavisa, for
example, would be a snake that bites and whose bite makes you
feel your body is burning.

>> Then in the Aasiivisasutta (S iv 172-5) the four mahaabhuuta are
>> compared to four (unspecified) kinds of viper. The Atthakathaa
>> gives these names based on the effects of their venom, but these
>> are not normal Pali words for snakes: ka.t.thamukha, puutimukha,
>> aggimukha, and satthamukha.


> Yes, it is this group of four -- but I do not believe that they are all
> vipers.

You're right. I was under the impression that 'viper' meant any
kind of venomous snake. Now I find it only means the viperidae
family.

> Regarding the names, as one can see from above, the Skt names also
> seem to be derived from the effects of the venom -- for example, there is
> another called `svaasa-vi.saa. In my sources, mention of the four most
> feared venomous snakes clearly refers to actual snakes. Since modern Indian
> sources state that there are four extremely deadly snakes (saw-scaled
> vipers, Russell's vipers, spectacled cobras and the common krait, which
> between them kill over 25,000 people per annum in India), I think it is
> reasonable to assume the the four classical venomous snakes and the four
> "modern" ones. I would just like to know which is which -- but
> surprisingly, nobody seems to know.
>
> Regarding Pali commentorial sources, one thing that did occur to
> me is that these highly venomous snakes don't actually live in
> Sri Lanka -- could that be the case ?

It seems unlikely to me. The four you named above are all found
in Sri Lanka, but even if it were some snake unique to India one
would expect that Buddhaghosa -- a native of Bodh Gaya -- would
have known about it.

A likelier explanation is that the Pali commentators had either
had no contact with those traditions in which the snakes were
given identities, or else they knew about it but thought it an
unnecessary distraction from the purpose of the simile. (The
snakes are not referred to in any other context in Pali sources).

Best wishes,

Dhammanando

P.S.

> It's just a pity that many UKIP representatives also espouse quasi-racist
> opinions -- a kind of soft version of the BNP ?

I see them as tough Tories rather than soft fascists. Their
small-government conservatism has little in common with the
authoritarian centralism advocated by the BNP.