Sakka (Indra): King of the Gods in Buddhism

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 5 November 2026

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Sakka (Pali; Sanskrit Śakra), the god better known as Indra, is the king of the gods in Buddhist cosmology: lord of the Thirty-Three, whose heaven crowns Mount Meru. The Pali suttas paint him as generous, devout and fallible — a god who worships the Buddha and, in the Sakkapañha Sutta (DN 21), calls himself a stream-enterer. He is mighty and long-lived, but still a being in saṃsāra, the round of rebirth, and no refuge.

Who is Sakka in Buddhism?

The suttas almost always call him devānamindo, “lord of gods”, an epithet that, Bhikkhu Sujato notes, “evokes his more familiar Sanskrit name, Indra.” He rules the devas of Tāvatiṃsa, the second of the six sense-sphere heavens on the 31 planes of existence, though G. P. Malalasekera’s Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names calls him “no absolute monarch”: “Sakka consults with them rather than issues them commands.”

When he tells frightened gods to look up at his banner in battle, the Buddha comments that their fear “might go away or it might not”, because “Sakka is not free of greed, hate, and delusion. He is fearful, scared, nervous, quick to flee” (SN 11.3). Asked whom he worships, Sakka answers: “It’s the fully awakened Buddha” (SN 11.19). Disguised as an embroiderer to give alms to Mahākassapa, and told not to do it again, he pleads: “we too need merit!” (Ud 3.7).

His reign is long, not endless: AN 3.70 makes a human century “one day and night for the gods of the thirty-three”, whose lifespan is “a thousand of these heavenly years.” The title is a post rather than a person: SN 11.11 says he “achieved the status of Sakka” by his conduct as a human; in AN 7.62 the Buddha recalls, “I was Sakka, lord of gods, thirty-six times”; and 84000’s glossary notes that “each world with a central Sumeru has a Śakra.”

His names, and how he differs from the Vedic Indra

SN 11.12, “Sakka’s Names”, explains each of his titles, the first four by what he did as a human:

As Sujato’s notes show, nearly every name is an old epithet of Indra given a new meaning. Maghavā “is a common epithet of Indra”; the Vedic Purandara, “Fortbreaker”, the Buddha “reforms” into Purindada, “Firstgiver”; Sakka, “the able one”, “was originally an epithet of Indra.” In the Rigveda period, writes Huh Hyeonguk of the Gyeongju National Museum, Indra was “the king of the gods and the highest form of god in India”; Wendy Doniger’s Britannica entry calls him “the great warrior who conquers the anti-gods (asuras)”, slayer of the dragon Vṛtra.

Scholars weigh the continuity differently. Sujato reads Sakka as Indra transformed. Malalasekera, following Rhys Davids, held that “Sakka and Indra are independent conceptions”: the shared epithets “are evidently borrowed, though they are differently explained.” Yet he too thinks the old conception “seems to have been softened and refined”, until “Sakka came to be regarded as an entirely separate god.” The Dhammapada (verse 30) gives the Buddhist moral: “Maghavā became chief of the gods / by means of diligence.”

The Sakka Saṃyutta: seven vows and a merciful war

A whole collection, the Sakka Saṃyutta (SN 11), is given to him: “twenty-five short suttas”, in Malalasekera’s count. SN 11.11 lists the seven vows he kept as a human, each beginning “As long as I live, may I…”: “support my parents”; “honor the elders in the family”; “speak gently”; “not backbite”; “live at home with heart rid of the stain of stinginess, freely generous, open-handed, loving to let go, committed to charity, loving to give and to share”; “speak the truth”; and “be free of anger, or should anger arise, may I quickly get rid of it.” These are householders’ virtues — family duty, kind and honest speech, generosity, patience.

Several suttas set Sakka in the gods’ long war with the asuras, or titans. In SN 11.4 he bears the insults of the captured titan lord Vepacitti; that exchange is quoted in Buddha quotes on anger. In SN 11.6 the gods have lost a battle and are fleeing north, the titans in pursuit, when Sakka calls to his charioteer:

Mātali turns the chariot; the titans, thinking the gods are coming back to fight, flee; “And that’s how Sakka came to win victory by principle.” Sujato calls it “the complete transformation of Indra from the war god who revels in slaughter.”

Sakka’s Questions: the Sakkapañha Sutta (DN 21)

In a note to MN 37, Sujato calls DN 21 “a long account of Sakka’s first meeting with the Buddha and conversion”. Sakka sends the centaur (gandhabba) Pañcasikha ahead to “charm the Buddha first” with a love song on his harp. Then he asks why gods, humans and titans, “though they wish to be free of enmity, violence, hostility, and hate”, still live with them. The Buddha answers: “the fetters of jealousy and stinginess”, and traces those back through “the liked and the disliked”, desire and thought — the chain followed on Buddhism and jealousy.

The joy Sakka once felt as victor over the titans “is in the sphere of the rod and the sword”; the joy of hearing the Buddha leads to “disillusionment, dispassion, cessation, peace, insight, awakening, and extinguishment.” He declares, “I am the Buddha’s disciple, a stream-enterer, not liable to be reborn in the underworld, assured, destined for awakening,” and near the end: “the stainless, immaculate vision of the Dhamma arose in Sakka, lord of gods: ‘Everything that is liable to arise is liable to cease.’ And also for another 80,000 deities.”

Two cautions. Sujato judges DN 21 a late discourse, citing its “late or unique terminology; fancy literary styles”. And the commentary adds what the sutta does not say: in Malalasekera’s summary, Sakka “saw signs that his life was drawing to an end”, and as he listened “he died in his old life and was reborn a new and young Sakka.”

In the sequel, MN 37, Moggallāna finds Sakka showing off his Palace of Victory instead of remembering a teaching, and shakes the palace “with his big toe” — a reminder, Sujato notes, that “even a stream-enterer may slow their progress by negligence.”

Sakka in the Jātaka tales

In the Jātaka tales Sakka appears, in Malalasekera’s phrase, as “the guardian of moral law in the world”, helping the future Buddha “in the practice of his Perfections” as King Sivi, Temiya, Nimi and Vessantara, “also in his birth as a hare”. The Jātaka verses are canonical; the prose stories, SuttaCentral explains, are “now found in the commentary”, and “Most of the Jātakas began life as folk tales or myths.”

In the prose of the Sasa Jātaka (Ja 316) a hare resolves to give his own flesh to any beggar on the fast-day, and “Sakka’s white marble throne manifested signs of heat.” Sakka comes as a hungry brahmin. The hare shakes himself three times so that any insects in his fur escape, then leaps into the fire, and it is “as if he had entered a region of frost.” “I am no brahmin,” says the god. “I am Sakka, and I have come to put your virtue to the test.” He then “daubed the sign of a hare on the orb of the moon.”

The Buddha in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three

The best-known story joining Sakka to the Buddha is not in the suttas, which say only that the Buddha’s mother “passes away and is reborn in the host of joyful gods”, Tusita, seven days after the birth (MN 123). The Pali commentaries, as Malalasekera summarises them, add that after the Twin Miracle the Buddha spent “the three months of the rainy season” in Tāvatiṃsa, teaching “the Abhidhamma Piṭaka to his mother (who came there to listen to him), seated on Sakka’s Paṇḍukambalasilāsana”, his marble throne. (On its history, see Abhidharma.)

For the return, “Sakka provides three ladders”: gold for the gods, silver for Mahā Brahmā, and jewels for the Buddha, who comes down at Saṅkassa (see the pilgrimage sites). The Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang, Malalasekera notes, found ladders there “built of brick and stone by the ancients”. The scene is old in art: the Metropolitan Museum holds a late 3rd-century CE drum panel from Nagarjunakonda depicting a stupa with the Buddha’s descent from Trayastrimsa Heaven, and a 19th-century Thai painting on silk of the descent at Sankissa.

Indra beyond the Pali canon

84000, translating the Tibetan canon, defines Śakra as “The lord of the gods in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three”, who “wields the thunderbolt”; his Tibetan name brgya byin, “one hundred sacrifices”, reads śakra as short for śata-kratu. In the Avatamsaka Sutra one assembly, the third in the 60-fascicle Chinese version Huh cites, is held in his Trāyastriṃśa heaven. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls Indra’s net “One of the metaphors from the Avatamsaka Sutra that is frequently used to illustrate mutual interdependence”, drawn from a “pre-Buddhist myth” in which “the god Indra has a net with a jewel at the intersection of every two strands.”

In Himalayan art, Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources identifies Indra by a broad fan-shaped crown, a “horizontal eye on the forehead and a vajra scepter”, and notes that he “is often depicted with a stringed instrument” in paintings of the Wheel of Life.

Sakka in Buddhist practice and art

In Theravāda, SN 11.3 itself is, Sujato notes, “a popular protection chant (paritta)” in the Maha Pirit Potha, though it turns the listener from Sakka’s banner to the Buddha (see Buddhist chanting).

In Thailand, the Legend of Phra Malai, which Princeton’s Martin Heijdra calls “one of the core texts of popular Theravada Buddhist teaching in Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand”, brings the monk to Tāvatiṃsa to meet Indra before the Cūḷāmaṇi Cetiya, “a stupa with the relics of the Buddha’s hair” — where, in the Jātaka commentary as Malalasekera summarises it, Sakka deposited the hair the Bodhisatta cut off and threw into the sky. LACMA’s curators note that the story “was often recited at funerals”; Heijdra adds that such readings are “now rarely performed.” The Erawan Museum’s “pilgrimage road”, for visitors who “wish to worship all the holy beings both in Buddhism and in Bhraman-Hinduism”, includes a statue of “Indra on Erawan Elephant”.

In Japan he is Taishakuten. The art dictionary JAANUS says he and Bonten (Brahmā) appear in scenes of the Buddha’s life, “particularly administering his first bath”, and that in Japan he “is always shown with Bonten or within the jūniten”, the Twelve Deities of esoteric Buddhism, where he stands for the east; at Tōji in Kyoto he is “a martial figure seated on an elephant.” In Korea, Huh notes, Indra (Jeseokcheon) and Brahmā are carved on both sides of the entrance to Seokguram Grotto’s main chamber (c. 751); in China images of the pair “dressed in the form of Chinese emperors” appear on Dunhuang murals “from the late eighth century”.

How the traditions differ

For his peers, see Brahmā in Buddhism, the Four Heavenly Kings, who report on human conduct to the gods of the Thirty-Three on uposatha days (AN 3.37), and Yama; for the whole map, Buddhist cosmology.