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The protective coil timed exactly to darkness: a serpent wraps the luminous, meditating/dead-but-living figure for the whole duration of the dark passage · seven days of storm, twelve hours of night · encircling without constricting, and releases the moment light returns. In both, the coiling serpent is servant and shield, and at the end it withdraws having taken nothing; the Pali text even ends with the serpent's own body abandoned (he 'made his own appearance disappear') as if the coil were only ever an instrument of the watch.
During a seven-day storm 'cold weather, storms, and darkness,' the Naga king Mucalinda 'seven times encircled the body of the Blessed One with his windings' and spread his hood over his head; when he 'saw the open, cloudless sky, he loosened his windings,' took the form of a youth, and stood with clasped hands before the Buddha.
set against Book of Am-Tuat
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