Naga (sacred serpent)

What this is

The naga (นาค; Pali nāga) is the great water-serpent of Southeast Asian cosmology — guardian of rivers, rain and the underworld treasure, and, in the Buddhist frame, a devout half-divine being who shelters the meditating Buddha under its hood. In the Lanna world the naga is everywhere at once: carved along temple stair-rails, coiled in the founding-myths of cities, invoked in rain-making and protective magic, and — as the catalogue shows — narrated at length in the birth-story literature.

What the catalogue holds

Eight witnesses carry a naga name in their title — every one of them a jātaka / watthu narrative (the Mahānāga-type and Bhūridatta-type serpent-king tales), not a ritual or cosmological treatise.

Inference — this is a sharp and telling shape. The naga the catalogue attests so far is the naga of story — the serpent-king as a moral character in a birth-tale — and not the naga of wichaa: the serpent invoked in a rain rite, drawn into a yantra, or laid out as the naga-under-the-earth whose direction a house-builder or grave-digger must consult. Those functional nagas almost certainly sit inside manuscripts that are titled for their genre (a ritual manual, an almanac) rather than for the serpent — so a title search undercounts the naga badly. Reading `raw_metadata` and page-content, not just title lines, is how the rest would surface.

Beyond the catalogue — the many bodies of the serpent

Tradition — the following is background from the wider Thai–Lanna tradition, not drawn from these eight manuscripts; treat specifics as orienting, not authoritative.

• The naga who guards the Dharma. In the canonical scene, the serpent-king Mucalinda raises his coils and hood to shield the newly-awakened Buddha from a storm — the naga as the model convert, wild power bent to protection. This is the register the catalogue's jātaka witnesses belong to.
• The rain-bringer. Across the region the naga governs water and fertility; the number of nagas "giving rain" in a year is a standard almanac reckoning, and naga-processions and rocket rites petition them for the monsoon. This is the naga as technology of weather — the seam where cosmology becomes ritual.
• The naga beneath the ground. A widely-used geomantic figure places a sleeping naga circling the earth through the year; its head-and-tail orientation dictates auspicious directions for building, digging and burial. Here the serpent is a working diagram, not a character.
• The naga in the line. Serpent forms are among the commonest motifs in protective yantra and on temple architecture (the balustrade naga swallowing the stair). The image is itself a charm.

Notes

• A title-count that under-reads the subject. The hard catalogue fact is n = 8, all narrative. Everything about the ritual and cosmological naga above is clearly-marked tradition — and a flag that the functional naga is present in the corpus but invisible to a title search. A content-level pass is the way to recover it.
• Where the rest lives. Inference — look for the working naga inside almanac and rite manuscripts (astrology, magic & ritual) and inside city-founding chronicles, where a naga typically marks the river or the site of a new capital.