A phurba read the way it was made: from the top down, one join at a time.
Everyone looks at the point first. It is the sharpest-looking thing on the object, so the eye goes there and stays. But a phurba was never built from the point up. The maker started at the crown and worked down, and every section was shaped to hand over cleanly to the next. If you want to understand the parts of a phurba, read it in that order, slowly, the way you would read the carving on a doorway.
What a phurba is for is in The Phurba: Why Tibet's Ritual Dagger Has Three Faces and No Edge; where the stake came from is in The Kila. This piece stays close to the object.
The parts of a phurba, top to bottom
No two old makers agreed on everything, but most followed one sequence. At the top sits a finial. Below it, three faces look out in three directions. Then comes the handle, then a creature's open mouth, and out of that mouth the blade, sometimes with serpents running down it to the point.
Robert Beer, a painter of Tibetan thangkas who has written two of the best-known books on Tibetan symbols, gives a useful key. As quoted from his Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols, the upper handle stands for wisdom and the lower blade for method, the skillful means that puts wisdom to work. It explains why the top of a phurba is crowded with faces that look, and the bottom is a single shape that acts.
The finial: half-vajra, horse head, or garuda
Himalayan Art Resources, the online archive run by the scholar Jeff Watt, puts the standard form in one line: phurbas "generally have three faces at the top and crowned with a half vajra." A half-vajra is one end of a vajra, its prongs closing in to meet at a tip. On many pieces it rises from a carved topknot of hair. A study of an early wooden phurba on Columbia University's Tibetan Culture site reads that flattened topknot as the nail head of the peg. It is the end you would strike.
Swap the half-vajra for a horse's head and the object belongs to a different practice, that of Hayagriva, the wrathful deity with a horse rising out of his hair. At National Museums Liverpool there is an ivory phurba whose finial carries heads of Hayagriva, and the museum notes you can tell him by the horse's head at the very tip. HAR adds something easy to miss: in his own paintings Hayagriva does not hold a phurba. The horse on top is a mark of lineage. It tells a practitioner which liturgy the peg serves.
The third finial belongs mostly to Bon, Tibet's other living religious tradition. HAR notes that Bon purbas usually carry several heads and are crowned with a garuda, with no vajra at all.
The three faces, and what each one is for
Below the finial are three faces. On most phurbas they belong to Vajrakilaya, the wrathful deity who holds the kila in his principal four-legged form, though some images show a figure whose lower body tapers into the peg; he has his own page in Vajrakilaya. There are three because the blade below has three faces. The top answers the bottom.
In painting, Vajrakilaya's center face is blue, his right face white and his left face red. Carvers working in plain wood or bronze often show the difference through expression instead. The large painted phurba at the Horniman Museum in London (33.113), eighty centimeters of carved wood, gives its blue Vajrakilaya three heads: one wrathful, one joyful, one peaceful.
The reading most often repeated for the colored faces is Beer's, again as quoted from the Handbook. The white right face is usually identified as Yamantaka, standing for body and the destruction of hatred. The blue center face is Amritakundali, for mind and the destruction of delusion. The red left face is Hayagriva, for speech and the destruction of greed. So the three faces at the top and the three faces of the blade at the bottom are the same three things seen from two ends: what has to be recognized, and what has to be pinned.
Up close, the faces carry the usual marks of wrathful deities. A third eye. Brows that rise like flame. Fangs. None of this ferocity is aimed at whoever is looking. In Tibetan iconography a wrathful face is compassion with its patience used up, turned on whatever stands in the way of waking up.
The handle: vajra, endless knots and the lotus band
The handle is where makers took the most liberties. Many simply used a full vajra, one end pointing up at the faces and one down at the blade, which makes the phurba, more or less, a vajra that has been given a stake.
The knot handle takes more patience to make. A woven knot sits at the top of the grip and another at the bottom, with a band of lotus petals between them. The Aro Encyclopaedia describes it on a bronze phurba, and the Columbia study finds the same order on its wooden one, two rows of petals facing each other around the middle. The knot is the endless knot, one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols, a single line that never finds its own end. The Aro writers read it on a phurba as the continuity of Vajrayana, and point out that tantra itself means continuity. A passage often quoted from Beer goes further: samsara and nirvana are held inside the "vast knots" at either end of the handle. The lotus between them is a seat. Nothing sacred is set down on bare ground.
The makara: where the blade is born
At the join sits a makara, a water creature from Indian and Himalayan art, usually given a crocodile's jaw and a snout that curls back like an elephant's trunk. The blade does not slot into the handle. It comes out of the makara's mouth.
Beer's handbook, as quoted, says the blade "issues from the open mouth of a makara," and reads the head as the ferocity and tenacity of the phurba. A crocodile does not let go, and that is the point. On the Horniman piece the makara has bulging, red-ringed eyes, and its white teeth close around the root of the blade.
This is the hardest part of a phurba to carve. The handle is round, the blade is triangular, and the makara has to turn one into the other. If you can see where the jaw stops and the blade starts, the carver has lost. On a good piece the lip of the makara curls over the blade as if the blade were its tongue.
The nagas on the blade
Many blades carry serpents. These are nagas, the water spirits of the Himalaya, whose longer story is in The Naga.
Beer describes pairs of coiling nagas descending from the makara's mouth into each of the three hollows of the blade. Three pairs make six, and he matches them to the six perfections, the same six carried in Vajrakilaya's six arms.
There may be an older reason serpents belong on a stake. The Columbia study traces the phurba back to the Vedic kila, a peg driven in to pin down an earth serpent before building began. It is a suggestive idea rather than a settled one, but if it is right, the snake was always part of the story. On the phurba it has stopped being the thing pinned and become part of the blade that does the pinning.
Plenty of phurbas have no snakes at all, and plain iron blades with smooth faces are common.
The three-sided blade and its point
Three flat faces, a triangle in section, tapering to a point. That is what makes the object a phurba and not a knife. Beer, as quoted, reads the triple edge as cutting the three root poisons of ignorance, greed and aggression. HAR's definition is plainer: "a three edged peg."
Run a thumb down one and there is nothing to cut you. The tips are rarely sharpened, because the blade is never used on a body. The Columbia author lists what it does pierce: a metal base, a sand mandala, an enemy held in visualization. The Metropolitan Museum's ebony phurba (2019.122a, b), made in Tibet in the late 14th or early 15th century and 42.5 cm tall, came to the museum with its own small stand. A phurba spends much of its life like that, upright and still, holding its place.
How the old makers varied it
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a 17th-century phurba from eastern Tibet (M.82.27) is made of bone, silver and carnelian, only 21.6 cm long. Its top is a polished slab of carnelian set in silver. The three heads are wrathful. The hilt is two matching sections of grinning skulls, trefoils and lotus petals, and below the join with the blade someone inscribed the syllable hum.
A brass phurba with an iron blade, about 13th century and 31.4 cm long, sold at Bonhams in Hong Kong in 2022. Its makara carries a tiny warrior deity, a detail the catalog calls rare, and long ritual handling has worn the surface to a warm copper color. Many hands over many years did that.
The Liverpool ivory phurba breaks the most basic rule: its blade has four edges, not three.
HAR's survey adds single-face phurbas with the head of a raksha, read as Mahakala, plain ones with no face at all, and regional types from the Dali Kingdom in Yunnan to pieces possibly made by the Naxi. The prized metal is meteorite iron, nam chag, "sky iron."
One more lineage matters to us. In 1407 a senior Tibetan teacher visited the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty and was sent home with gifts. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a set of ritual weapons from the Yongle imperial workshop (1978.9), iron alloy inlaid with gold and silver, which it believes were among them because the axe carries the emperor's mark. The museum points to the lion heads and cloud scrolls as the work of imperial Chinese hands. Our own phurba's proportions follow a type from that same Yongle period.
Our phurba pendant, part by part
Our Phurba Pendant keeps those Yongle proportions. It is 65 mm long and weighs 20 g, enough that you know it is there on a chain.
The crown is a four-pronged crossed vajra instead of a half-vajra, its prongs curling in from four directions. On the 24K Fire-Gilded Edition, natural garnets are set by hand into the makara heads of the crown.
The faces are arranged differently from the classic form. Instead of three around one topknot, ours stacks three heads down the handle, each carved on its own with its own expression. Garuda sits at the top, the bird that eats serpents (see Garuda in Tibet). The Lord of the Charnel Ground is in the middle. Vajrakilaya is at the base, where handle turns into blade. With a garuda above and nagas below, the old quarrel between bird and serpent runs the length of the piece.
There are no knots on ours. The heads take that space, and scroll and cloud work wraps the whole body of the handle. Every joint is marked with a band of raised beads: crown to prongs, prongs to the first head, head to head, head to makara. Each bead is cut on its own. They are the smallest things on the pendant and there are more of them than of anything else.
The blade comes out of the makara's jaws with no seam, and nagas run in low relief down all three faces, twisting around each other as the blade narrows. Turn it over and the back faces of the blade are carved as deeply as the front. Even the bail has its own pattern.
It comes in two editions with the same carving. The Pure Silver Edition has no gold and no stones; the oxidized recesses and the bright raised work are all there is. On the Fire-Gilded Edition, gold is fused into the silver by fire at about 900°C, well under gold's 1064°C melting point. It goes across the garuda's face, around the beaded collars, into the flames and faces of the handle and along the serpents. Then every line is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so the gold follows the serpents and beads without filling the undercuts that give the carving its shadow. The process is described in Traditional Fire-Gilding, and the rest of our Tibetan work is in Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry.
A pendant is an image of a phurba, made to be worn. It is not a consecrated implement, and we make no claim that it protects anyone or removes anything from a life.
Frequently asked questions
What are the main parts of a phurba?
From the top: a finial, usually a half-vajra or a horse head; three faces; a handle of vajra or knotwork; a makara head; and a three-sided blade, sometimes with serpents running down it.
What do the three faces on a phurba mean?
They are usually Vajrakilaya's three faces. In Robert Beer's reading, the white right face is Yamantaka (body), the blue center face Amritakundali (mind) and the red left face Hayagriva (speech), each set against one of hatred, delusion and greed.
What is the makara on a phurba?
The water creature at the join of handle and blade, with a crocodile's jaw and a curling snout. The blade comes out of its mouth.
Why are there snakes on a phurba blade?
They are nagas. Beer describes three pairs coming out of the makara's mouth and links them to the six perfections. Some writers also connect them to a Vedic peg said to pin an earth serpent. Many phurbas have no snakes.
How old is the phurba?
Very old. Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer translated every phurba text so far identified among the Dunhuang manuscripts, the cave library sealed in the early 11th century, and found them unexpectedly close to the tradition Nyingma lamas still practice.
Silver darkens with time. On a piece carved this deep the black settles into the recesses, and the raised edges, the brows, the beads and the backs of the serpents stay bright where skin and cloth rub them. Give it a few years on a chain and it begins to look a little like the old bronzes. Nobody can carve that. It only comes from being worn.