How a word for a wooden peg became a deity, crossed the Himalaya, and turned up, centuries later, with an emperor's mark inlaid in gold.
Before it was a dagger, the kila was a stake. The Sanskrit word kīla means a peg, a pin, a wedge: a sharpened piece of wood you drive into the ground so that something stays where you put it. The kila dagger history we follow here runs from that plain object to the three-sided phurba of Tibet, and on to Vajrakilaya, the deity who holds it at his heart.
Some of this story comes from Tibetan tradition, and some from manuscripts and objects that can be dated. Both deserve respect, and we keep them apart. If you have never looked closely at a phurba, The Phurba: Why Tibet's Ritual Dagger Has Three Faces and No Edge is the place to start.
A peg before it was a blade
Open a Sanskrit dictionary at kīla and the entries read like the inventory of a carpenter's bench. Stake. Pin. Bolt. Wedge. Post. None of them cuts anything.
India had ritual stakes long before Buddhist tantra, and the most carefully made of them was the yūpa, the post of Vedic animal sacrifice. The rules for it are oddly specific. It had to be cut from one of four trees, khadira or palāśa among them. It was shaped with eight faces, one wider than the rest and turned toward the fire. Its height was reckoned from the height of the patron of the sacrifice, and the bottom fifth, the part that went into the earth, was left rough and unchiselled. Only the part people would see got finished.
Anyone who carves will recognize that last detail.
The Oxford scholar Robert Mayer argues that the classic Tibetan phurba makes "unmistakeable reference" to this sacrificial post, and his 1992 paper on the Tibetan phur-ba and the Indian kīla was written to show that the kila had a long and complex history in India before it ever reached Tibet.
When the stake became a god
The Guhyasamāja Tantra is one of the foundational scriptures of Indian Buddhist tantra, and its fourteenth chapter, Mayer notes, holds a great deal of kila ritual. Vajrakila is already there by name, paired with another wrathful deity, Amṛtakuṇḍalin.
In The Cult of the Deity Vajrakila (1993), Martin Boord concluded that a kila cult among Indian Buddhists in the eighth century "must now surely be accepted as established." Mayer, who argues with Boord about plenty in his own study of a Nyingma kila scripture, The Phur-pa bcu-gnyis (1996), agrees with him on this: the implement and the deity are both Indian.
Where they part ways is the name. Boord read "Vajrakilaya" as a Tibetan slip, a grammatical form from the salutation namo vajrakīlaya mistaken for a proper noun. Mayer, backed by the Sanskritist Alexis Sanderson, thinks kīlaya may come from a verb meaning to bind, so that the god's name is an order: pin it. We like Mayer's version, though nobody can prove it. It would mean the deity was named for the moment the point goes in. More about him in Vajrakilaya, the Wrathful Deity of the Phurba.
Yangleshö and Samye, as tradition tells it
In the Tibetan account, Padmasambhava was in retreat with his consort at Yangleshö, near present-day Pharping on the southern rim of the Kathmandu Valley, and his practice kept being broken by obstructing forces. Two Newar disciples were sent to Nālandā to ask for the kila teachings. When the texts arrived, the obstacles stopped. He, Vimalamitra and the Nepali master Śīlamañju then gathered the scattered kila material into one commentary, the Black Hundred-Thousand-Word Commentary on the Kīla.
King Trisong Detsen brought the Indian abbot Śāntarakṣita to build Tibet's first monastery, and the legend says the local spirits pulled the walls down at night until Padmasambhava was called to subdue them. Sources disagree on the dates; the Treasury of Lives gives completion around 775 and an inauguration in 779. Afterward, at the empowerment held near Samye at Chimpu, tradition says Yeshe Tsogyal's flower fell on the mandala of Vajrakilaya, and one of Padmasambhava's disciples, Khön Lu'i Wangpo, took the practice into his family.
Tibet already had a habit of nailing down its ground. Texts from the eleventh century onward tell how Songtsen Gampo built twelve temples on the shoulders, hips, elbows, knees, hands and feet of a demoness lying on her back, whose body was the land itself. A painting of her in the Rubin Museum (C2006.1.1) marks the temples on her limbs and draws Samye in to the south of Lhasa. Temples and stupas as nails: a phurba is that idea cut down to the size of a hand.
Someone's notes from Dunhuang
Tradition was written down long after the fact. The Dunhuang manuscripts were walled into a library cave on the Silk Road around the start of the eleventh century and stayed there until 1900, so everything they say about the kila was set down before then.
Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer read and translated all the Dunhuang phurba texts identified so far for Early Tibetan Documents on Phur pa from Dunhuang (2008). They found the early material in an "unexpectedly close relationship" to the Nyingma practice that came after it. Mayer also argues that the classic kila design was already settled by the time these texts were copied.
One of those texts stays with us. Mayer describes Pelliot 349, a Dunhuang text on Vajrakila, as looking very much like "a note or aide-mémoire for personal use." A practitioner's crib sheet. It repeats a mantra from that same fourteenth chapter of the Guhyasamāja. Someone more than a thousand years ago wrote down the words they needed to remember for this practice, in their own hand, and the page survived.
Mayer is careful about what those rites were for. The old Indian sacrificial gestures are still visible in them, but the Tibetan rite of "liberation" has become, in his reading, a bloodless copy of blood sacrifice, and what gets pinned is whatever blocks awakening.
A short kila dagger history, in dates
- Late 8th century (traditional). Padmasambhava receives the kila tantras at Yangleshö and teaches them in Tibet after Samye is built.
- 1073. Khön Könchok Gyalpo (1034–1102) founds Sakya Monastery. The family's own Vajrakilaya line, the Khön Phur, is traced to Khön Lu'i Wangpo.
- 14th century. Rigdzin Gödem (1337–1409) reveals the Northern Treasures, whose phurba cycle Boord's book is built on.
- 1403–1424. The Yongle reign of the Ming. Imperial workshops make Tibetan ritual implements as gifts for visiting lamas.
- 1450–1521. Pema Lingpa, Bhutan's great treasure revealer. A phurba credited to his discoveries is kept by the Royal Government of Bhutan.
The Bon phurba, and the healers of Nepal
Buddhists never had the phurba to themselves. In Bon it is a ritual object and also a deity, Purba Drugse Chempa, and Jean-Marc des Jardins counts at least nine separate phurba traditions in Bon. You can often tell a Bon piece from across a room. Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources notes that Bon phurbas usually stack several heads and put a garuda on top, with no vajra, where Buddhist ones tend toward three faces under a half vajra, or the horse's head of Hayagriva.
In Nepal it reaches further still. Tamang, Gurung and Newar ritual specialists all use it. The Newar gubaju priests inherit their lineages through families; the jhankri healers usually do not. Same peg, very different hands.
Ming dynasty phurbas and the Yongle workshops
The Yongle Emperor of the Ming courted Tibetan lamas with titles and gifts. In April 1407 the Fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shekpa, entered Nanjing, and the court's workshops were already turning out gilt bronzes and ritual implements in a style that mixed Chinese hands with Tibetan forms. A Sotheby's catalog essay counts about fifty-four Yongle-inscribed gilt bronzes recorded in Tibetan monasteries, kept there because they had been given away.
The Cleveland Museum of Art has a set of these Yongle-period iron implements, inlaid with gold and silver (1978.9). The ritual axe in the set is 40.4 cm long, and at the top of its handle, just above a snake's head, the Yongle reign mark is inlaid in gold. The blades come out of lions' mouths. The museum thinks the set was probably among the gifts to a senior Tibetan patriarch who visited the emperor in 1407. Look at where those blades leave the lions' jaws and you are looking at the same problem a phurba maker faces at the makara: how to let a blade come out of a living mouth with no seam.
Himalayan Art Resources records a Yongle-period bronze phurba given to Sakya Monastery, and sets it beside a small group of phurbas carved from ebony with painted wrathful faces. One of these, 42 cm tall and now in a private collection, was once inlaid with ivory earrings and ivory teeth. Scholars disagree about when the ebony group was made, some reading them as Ming court commissions and others as Qing work of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum dates its own ebony phurba, 42.5 cm and painted, to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century (2019.122a, b). The Rubin's, smaller at about 31 cm and still holding ivory and pigment, is catalogued as seventeenth century (C2005.3.1).
These are big objects, close to the length of a forearm. Somebody turned that hard black wood into three faces with bared teeth, and it is hard to look at one without thinking about the hands.
Where to see a phurba in museums
- The Met, New York. Ebony phurba and stand, 2019.122a, b.
- Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. Ebony and ivory phurba, C2005.3.1.
- Cleveland Museum of Art. Yongle ritual implements, 1978.9 and 1978.9.3.
- Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Carved wooden ritual dagger topped with a buffalo head, Tibet or Bhutan, about 1890–1930. IS.57-2011, in the Himalayas gallery.
On almost any of them the order runs the same way down: faces or a vajra, the grip, a makara at the join, then a three-sided blade, often with serpents coiling to the tip (the parts of a phurba; for the serpents, The Naga).
The object is still in use, and not behind glass. At Sera Je Monastery, re-established in South India, a Hayagriva phurba comes out once a year, on the 27th day of the twelfth Tibetan month. A custodian monk performs the morning customs, the phurba is carried to the abbot's throne, and the abbot touches it to the head of every person who has come. The line usually runs well past noon. People wait.
Why we followed the Yongle form
Our Phurba Pendant keeps the proportions of a type that came down from the Yongle period, unchanged. A crossed vajra at the crown. Garuda, the Lord of the Charnel Ground and Vajrakilaya stacked down the grip, each head carved separately with its own expression. The blade coming out of a makara's jaws, with serpents worked into all three faces.
The join is where you find out whether you understand the thing. On the Cleveland axe the blade leaves a lion's mouth; on ours it leaves the makara's, and the lip and the blade have to run into each other so you can't say where one ends. At 65 by 40 millimeters, all of that happens in a very small space. Between every section is a band of raised beads, and each grain is cut on its own. The back is carved as deep as the front.
On the 24K fire-gilded edition the gold goes into the garuda's face, the beaded collars, the faces down the grip and the serpents on the blade, and natural garnets sit in the makara heads of the crown. Then every line is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so the gold stays on the serpents and the beading and keeps out of the undercuts that give the carving its shadow. The pure silver edition has no gold and no stones. Either way it weighs 20 grams. Silver darkens over the years, and on a piece this deep that mostly helps: the recesses hold the dark and the high points stay bright.
It is a pendant, an image of the ritual object rather than the object itself, and we don't claim it does anything for whoever wears it. What it does carry is a set of proportions that someone settled on a very long time ago. We tried not to lose any of them.
Frequently asked questions
Where did the phurba originate?
In India. Martin Boord and Robert Mayer agree that both the kila and the deity Vajrakila are Indian, and Boord dates a Buddhist kila cult there to at least the eighth century. Tibetan tradition credits Padmasambhava with bringing it to Tibet.
What does "kila" mean?
A stake, peg, pin or wedge. It is the Sanskrit word for the object Tibetans call a phurba, and it names what the object does: it goes in, and it holds.
Is the kila Hindu or Buddhist?
The ritual stake is older than either tradition's tantras; Vedic sacrifice was built around the yūpa. The three-sided kila and the deity Vajrakila belong to Buddhist tantra, though Bon and Nepali ritual specialists use the phurba too.
How old is the oldest phurba?
The design was already settled in Dunhuang manuscripts copied before about the year 1000. Of surviving objects, the Metropolitan Museum dates its ebony phurba to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.
Who brought the phurba to Tibet?
Tibetan tradition says Padmasambhava, after Samye was founded in the late eighth century. Dunhuang texts already link his name with the kila.
Why are there Ming dynasty phurbas?
The Yongle Emperor (reign era 1403–1424) had his workshops make Tibetan ritual implements as gifts for lamas. A set of such iron implements, not itself a phurba, is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Himalayan Art Resources records a Yongle-period bronze phurba given to Sakya Monastery.
Phurba Pendant · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry · Traditional Fire-Gilding
More from the Journal: The Phurba · Vajrakilaya · Garuda in Tibet · Vajra Meaning