Gandharva

← Encyclopedia

A gandharva, in Indian religious literature, is a member of a class of celestial beings best known as the musicians of the gods — singers and players at the courts of heaven, half-divine and faintly dangerous. The word is ancient, present already in the oldest Vedic hymns, and over the long span of Indian thought it gathers more than one meaning.

In the Rigveda the figure is largely singular and strange: a Gandharva who dwells in the high vault of the sky, guards the sacred soma — the pressed draught the gods desired — and knows the secret things of heaven. Already he is bound up with the waters and with the apsaras, the celestial nymphs who are his consorts; the pairing of gandharva and apsaras runs through the later literature as a fixed motif. By the time of the epics and the Purānas the gandharvas have become a numerous order, a recognized rank of demigods who make the music at the assemblies of Indra, king of the gods, and who are credited with skill in medicine and a knowledge that crosses into the realm of charms and illusion. A marriage by mutual desire alone, without rite or kin, was called a gandharva marriage, after their reputation for sudden passion.

Buddhist cosmology kept the gandharvas as low divinities — heavenly musicians among the host of beings who attend the Buddha — but gave the word a second, more technical life. In the analysis of rebirth, the gandhabba (the Pali form) is the being that must be present, alongside the union of parents and the right season, for conception to occur: the one seeking a new birth, the consciousness in transit between one life and the next. Later Buddhist traditions, especially in Tibet, elaborated this into the doctrine of the intermediate state, where the between-lives being subsists on scent alone — a folk etymology, since the name was popularly read as “fragrance-eater.”

Scholarship treats the various gandharvas with caution. Whether the lone sky-dweller of the early hymns and the choir of demigods in the epics are one conception developed or several conflated is genuinely unsettled, and comparisons have long been drawn — the resemblance of the name to the Greek kentauros, centaur, has been proposed and disputed for more than a century without resolution. What the texts agree on is narrower and more durable: that the music of heaven has its own players, that they stand a step below the gods and a step above the human, and that the same word came to name both the singer in the celestial hall and the soul on its way to being born.

→ Related: Rudra · Tara