The Four Great Kings Four Great Kings are devas in the Indian pantheon where they occupy the lowest of the devalokas (god realms). They feature in some of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, representing a strand of Indian religous thought which was being adopted and adapted by Buddhists, probably in the first few centuries after the death of the Buddha. Each one presides over one of the four directions of space, and is associated with a particular type of non-human being. A very early set of four directional gods appears in the Yajur Veda with Agni (E), Yama (S), Savitṛ (W), and Varuna (N). The gods of the directions were shuffled around in Brāhmaṇa texts. See also my essay on an early maṇḍalas , which discusses a maṇḍala in the Bṛhadāraṇuaka Upaniṣad. Scholars, however, place there origins of the four Lokapālas in the pre-Ariyan indigenous population of India. I favour a hybrid appraoch. Since some of the figures clearly do relate to Vedic gods in some ways (eg Vaiśravana...
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