A monastery that would not stay built, a stake that was never meant to cut, and what the three faces of the blade are for.
In the eighth century, the Tibetan king Trisong Detsen set out to build the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, at Samye. The histories say it did not go well. Whatever the builders raised by day came down again by night, and the local powers of the land, the old gods of the mountains, would not allow it to stand.
So the king sent for Padmasambhava, the tantric master from Oddiyana. Tradition says he performed a ritual dance on the site to subdue the forces working against the building and to settle the ground. After that, the walls stayed up. Samye was completed in 779, laid out as a mandala with a temple standing for Mount Meru at its centre, and the first Tibetan monks were ordained there.
Samye is also the monastery where our founder, Ren Chuanwei, is a lay Buddhist. And the teacher in that story, Padmasambhava, is the one most closely tied to the object this article is about: the phurba.
A stake, not a knife
A phurba looks like a dagger. It has a handle, a guard and a blade that tapers to a point. But the blade has three faces and no cutting edge. It cannot slice anything, and it was never meant to.
The Sanskrit name, kila, means a stake or a peg, and both the Tibetan and Sanskrit words come from roots meaning to bind or to fix in place. A phurba is driven down, not swung. In ritual it is used to stabilise the ground of a ceremony and to pin down whatever would disturb it, so that it cannot get up again.
What gets pinned is not a person. The three faces of the blade are usually read as the three poisons that Buddhism places at the root of suffering: craving, aversion and delusion. They come down together or not at all.
Vajrakilaya, the deity who is the dagger
Behind the phurba stands a deity, Vajrakilaya: one of the great wrathful forms of Tibetan Buddhism, and the one invoked when an obstacle has to be ended rather than managed. In paintings the lower half of his body tapers into a three-sided blade. He does not hold the phurba. He is the phurba.
Vajrakilaya practice is closely bound up with Padmasambhava. Tradition holds that he practised it at Yangleshö, near Pharping in the Kathmandu Valley, to clear the obstacles that stood between him and his final realisation. It has been central to the Nyingma school ever since, and important to other Tibetan lineages too.
"Wrathful" is the most misread word in all of this. These faces are not angry at you. In Tibetan iconography, wrath is what compassion looks like when patience has stopped working, when the kind approach has been tried for years and the thing is still there.
How to read a phurba, top to bottom
Phurbas vary enormously, from rough iron stakes to gilded bronzes, but most follow the same order from top to bottom.
- The crown. Often three faces, or the horse's head of Hayagriva, or a vajra. On many it is a crossed vajra: four arms at right angles, stable from every direction.
- The handle. Frequently shaped like a vajra, sometimes with knots or faces stacked along it, a column of protectors between the crown and the blade.
- The makara. At the join, the blade often comes out of the open jaws of a makara, a water creature with an elephant's trunk and a crocodile's jaw. The blade is born from its mouth rather than fitted to the handle.
- The blade. Three-sided, tapering to a single point, often with nagas, serpents, twisting along its faces: poison brought under the thing that subdues it.
In many of the masked cham dances still performed at Tibetan monasteries, the climax comes when a dancer drives a phurba into a small figure representing what obstructs, and the ritual is completed by pinning it down.
The phurba we make
Our Phurba Pendant follows the proportions of a type that came down from the Yongle reign of the Ming dynasty, when the imperial workshops were producing Tibetan ritual bronzes of extraordinary quality. We did not streamline it. We took the old proportions and built to them.
A crossed vajra forms the crown. Down the handle are three heads, each carved separately with its own expression. At the top is Garuda, the bird that eats serpents; there is more about him in Garuda in Tibet. In the middle is the Lord of the Charnel Ground, guardian of the cremation ground. At the base, where the handle becomes the blade, is Vajrakilaya himself. The blade issues from a makara's jaws, with serpents in relief on all three faces. Beaded bands, each grain cut by hand, mark every joint, and the back is carved as deeply as the front.
It comes in two editions with identical carving.
The Pure Silver Edition has no gold and no stones. With nothing bright to lead the eye, the cutting has to hold the piece up on its own.
The 24K Fire-Gilded Edition lays gold into the silver by fire: across the garuda's face, around the beaded collars, into the flames and faces down the handle, and along the serpents on the blade. Natural garnets are set by hand into the makara heads of the crown. Every line is then re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so the gold stays where it belongs; the process is explained in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
Both editions measure 65 × 40 × 12 mm (2.6 × 1.6 × 0.5 in) and weigh 20 g (0.7 oz). Each comes on a titanium bead chain of about 65 cm (26 in), or you can choose a silver chain that closes on a carved S-hook with garuda and vajra-head ends.
What a phurba is not
It is not a weapon, and it is not a charm. We do not claim that wearing one will protect you or remove anything from your life. What it can be is a reminder, in silver, that some things in a life do not get talked round, or waited out, or gently encouraged to leave. They have to be pinned.
May what needs ending in you be ended cleanly, and stay ended.
Phurba Pendant · Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry
More from the Journal: Garuda in Tibet · The Eight Auspicious Symbols · Lungta, the Wind Horse