A silver palace near Kailash, a wager over a horse's tail, and why the great bird of the Himalaya is always shown with a serpent.
Southwest of Mount Kailash, where the Sutlej River cuts west through a desert of eroded clay, there is a cliff honeycombed with caves. Tibetans call the place Khyunglung Ngulkhar: the Silver Palace of the Garuda Valley.
Tradition remembers it as the capital of Zhangzhung, the kingdom that ruled western Tibet before the Tibetan empire, and as a heartland of Bon, the religion that was there before Buddhism arrived. Very little archaeology has been done at the site, and scholars still argue about whether it was ever a city in the ordinary sense. Nobody argues about the name.
For a workshop that carves silver and takes its name from Kailash, it is a hard name to walk past. A silver palace, a valley of the garuda, in the shadow of the mountain.
Who the garuda is
The garuda's story starts in India, with two sisters married to the same sage. Kadru asked for a thousand sons and hatched a thousand serpents, the nagas. Vinata asked for two, and the second was Garuda.
The sisters made a bet on the colour of a horse's tail. The horse was divine, white from nose to tail, and Vinata said so. Kadru said the tail was black, then sent her serpent sons to hang from it as black hairs. Vinata lost the wager and became her sister's slave.
The serpents named their price for her freedom: the nectar of immortality, from the gods themselves. Garuda flew up and took it. He freed his mother, and the nectar was snatched back before the nagas could drink. They were left licking the sharp grass it had rested on, and that, the story says, is why a snake's tongue is split. Garuda never forgave them. Vishnu made him his mount, and the enmity between the bird and the serpent has never ended.
The khyung of Tibet
When Buddhism brought the Indian garuda over the Himalaya, it found an older bird already waiting. In Bon, the khyung was a great sky bird of fire and light, associated especially with healing. The two merged so completely that in Tibetan the words are now used for the same creature.
That is why the Tibetan garuda looks the way it does. It has horns, often with a jewel between them. It has a hooked beak, great wings, and talons, and very often a serpent held in its beak or its hands.
Why it eats serpents
Nagas are not simply evil. In Tibetan belief they are spirits of water and the underground, living in springs, lakes and rivers, guarding wealth. Left in peace, they are neighbours. But a naga that is offended, by a polluted spring or a disturbed stone, is believed to strike back with illness, and certain illnesses, skin complaints above all, were traditionally blamed on them. In both Bon and Buddhist ritual, the garuda is the one called on against that harm.
Over time the poison came to mean more than venom. Buddhism speaks of three poisons of the mind: craving, aversion and ignorance. Tibetan teachers often point to the garuda for the same reason: it takes in poison and is not harmed. On our pieces we think of it as the bird for the quiet harms, the resentment and fixation a person carries for years without noticing.
Hatched already able to fly
One more detail from the old texts has stayed with us. The garuda's wings are said to form fully inside the egg, so the chick flies the moment the shell breaks. It never learns to fly. It only has to get out.
Tibetan teachers, in the Dzogchen tradition especially, use this as an image of the awakened mind: already complete, not built up piece by piece, only waiting to be uncovered. You can see why a carver would find that moving. The form is in the silver before the first cut. The work is taking away what hides it.
Where you will see it
Once you start looking, the garuda is everywhere in the Himalaya. It crowns the top of thangka paintings and temple doorways. It sits in an upper corner of every wind horse prayer flag, paired with the dragon; the story of that horse is in Lungta, the Wind Horse. And it appears at the heart of the vajra, the ritual thunderbolt, which is where it has taken up most of our bench time.
Carving a garuda in silver
The garuda is one of the two subjects we have spent the most years on. Feathers are unforgiving: every row has to be freed from the row beneath it, or the wing turns into a texture.
The Garuda Pendant is the whole story in one object. It is carved in the round, front and back, 57 × 53 × 27 mm (2.2 × 2.1 × 1.1 in) and 67 g (2.4 oz), with the wings curving forward as they would at the top of a beat. Gold goes in four places only: a crest of flame on the brow, a ring around each eye, the two serpents coiled along the flanks, and the talons closed on a scroll of fire. Gold everywhere would be wallpaper. Gold on the eyes makes a face.
The gold is fused into the silver with fire, then every edge is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so the gold stays where it belongs. On the smallest surfaces, like the talons, that takes longest. We explain the whole process in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
The garuda and the thunderbolt
Vajra means both thunderbolt and diamond: what cuts through anything, and what nothing can cut. Where a ritual vajra usually has a plain sphere at its centre, ours carry the garuda's head, the bird that cannot be poisoned set at the point where the object gathers its force.
- The Garuda Vajra Pendant keeps the proportions of the ritual implement: 60 mm (2.4 in) tip to tip, ten makara-headed prongs, eight garnets, 33 g (1.2 oz). In pure silver, or with 24K fire-gilding.
- The Garuda Five-Pronged Vajra Pendant turns the vajra on its side so it lies flat across the chest, 50 mm (2.0 in) long and 22 g (0.8 oz), on a cord braided by hand in Tibet.
- The Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant crosses two complete vajras at right angles: sixteen makara heads, a natural garnet in every one, the garuda at the crossing on four lotus thrones. 50 × 50 mm (2.0 × 2.0 in), 39 g (1.4 oz). The fire-gilded Genesis edition takes about fourteen days at the bench.
In Buddhist cosmology, a crossed vajra lies beneath Mount Meru, the axis of the world, as the ground nothing can shift. Many traditions identify Meru with Kailash itself. So the garuda at the centre of our crossed vajra sits, in a sense, at the foot of the mountain we are named for.
The smallest one
At the other end of the scale is the Garuda Garnet Pinky Ring: a slim open band, a bird's head no bigger than a grain of rice, a natural garnet set into its brow, and a single fire-gilded line running from head to tail. In China, a ring on the little finger is said to keep away the "small people", the petty and two-faced. The bird that eats poison, on the finger that turns it away.
A note on what we claim
We write about what the garuda has meant to the people who carved it, painted it and prayed to it for more than a thousand years. That is history and culture. We do not claim that a silver garuda will protect you, heal you or change what happens to you. What you bring to it is your own.
What we can promise is the work: carved by hand, finished on every face, and made by people who have spent years learning how to free a feather from silver.
May nothing with venom in it ever find the way to you.
May what frightens others pass beneath your wings.
Garuda Pendant · Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry