The Snake King

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Spread loving-kindness to snakes, and the verse for doing it is given in full.

What is actually claimed

The claim is causal and specific: if he had, he wouldn’t have died due to a snake bite. Not that loving-kindness makes death easier, or that it is good practice, or that it produces a calm mind in the presence of danger. That the monk would not have been bitten.

It is worth stating that plainly before offering any interpretation, because a great deal of writing on this discourse quietly softens it. The text says what it says.

The Vinaya records the same episode as the occasion for a rule permitting monastics to learn this verse as a self-protection, which suggests the tradition took it literally from very early on.

Paritta

This is one of the canon’s protective texts — paritta, a safeguard. The category includes the Ratana, Maṅgala, and Karaṇīyametta suttas, and these are among the most-recited texts in the Theravāda world, chanted at blessings, illnesses, house-warmings, and funerals.

The verse here contains its own description of what it is: I’ve made this safeguard, I’ve made this protection: go away, creatures! That is an apotropaic formula, and the discourse does not present it as anything else.

A guide that pretended the early canon contains no protective magic would be misrepresenting it. This material is there, it is old, and it is in continuous use.

What the verse actually does

The content of the protection is worth reading closely, because it is not a spell in the ordinary sense. It is a declaration of loving-kindness, extended in three widening circles.

First the four snake families by name. Then all creatures by number of feet — footless, two-footed, four-footed, many-footed — which is the same classification AN 4.34 used for the range of beings. Then all sentient beings, all living things, all creatures, every one: may they see only nice things, may bad not come to anyone.

So the operative content is mettā without limit, and the protection is claimed to follow from it. That is consistent with the standard teaching on loving-kindness, which lists protection from harm among its benefits — and it makes the verse a practice text rather than an incantation, whatever the framing around it does.

The closing lines shift again: the Buddha, teaching, and Saṅgha are immeasurable while crawling things are limited. The argument, if it is one, is about scale: what is being invoked is larger than what is being warded off.

How to teach it

Three positions are available and the honest thing is to name them rather than choose silently for the reader.

The literal reading takes the causal claim as stated: loving-kindness genuinely prevents snakebite. This is the tradition’s own reading and it is held by many practitioners today.

The psychological reading observes that a person who is not afraid moves differently around snakes, and that fear is what gets people bitten. This is defensible and it recovers a mechanism, but it is not what the discourse says.

The third position takes the verse as a practice text whose value does not depend on the protective claim. Spreading loving-kindness to snakes, spiders, scorpions, and mice is a real exercise with a real effect on the practitioner, and the verse is unusually good at it because it forces the four-footed and the footless into the same sentence as oneself.

This page does not adjudicate between them. What it will say is that the third is available without dishonesty and the second requires more care than it usually gets.

The list of creatures

Snakes and scorpions, centipedes, spiders and lizards and mice. The list is worth noticing for how unheroic it is.

These are not the dangers of a cosmology — not Māra, not hell-beings, not the titans. They are the things that come into a hut at night in a hot country. The discourse is addressed to people sleeping on the ground in forests, and the protection it offers is against what actually killed them.

That grounding is worth keeping in view when the verse is used elsewhere. Its subject is the ordinary hazard of a life lived outdoors, and its response is to extend loving-kindness to the hazard by name.

Key terms