On choosing a small three-sided peg to wear, and on keeping it well once it is yours.
At the Harvard Art Museums there is a phurba of wood with a metal tip that stands 7.3 centimeters high (accession 1972.302). That is about the length of a thumb. Lay it beside most phurba pendants made today and the two would be close to the same size. The small phurba did not start in the jewelry trade.
Choosing one well comes down to a few things you can check with your own eyes, and wearing one well comes down to a few habits. For the deity and the history behind the form, see The Phurba: Why Tibet's Ritual Dagger Has Three Faces and No Edge.
What a phurba pendant actually copies
The Tibetan word is phurba. The Sanskrit is kila, a peg or a stake, the kind of thing you drive into ground to hold a rope. Scholars still argue over the exact form of the deity's name. Martin Boord, a scholar of the Vajrakila texts, held that kila is correct and that the common "kilaya" came from a grammatical ending in the invocation namo vajrakilaya; Robert Mayer has argued it may come from a verb meaning "to bind." Either way, the word is about fixing something in place. The blade has three faces and no edge because a peg does not need one. It goes down, and it holds.
The Metropolitan Museum's catalog puts the ritual job plainly: the phurba is meant to symbolically consume the three poisons, and its use is first described in the Vajrakilaya Tantra, a text the museum dates to the eighth century or earlier. In Nyingma practice the phurba is understood as the body of the deity Vajrakilaya himself. The V&A notes that phurbas are sometimes planted in groups to mark and hold an area. On a shrine it is a consecrated implement, and by tradition it is handled in practice by people who have received the empowerment for it.
A pendant borrows that shape. It is not being used in the rite, and nobody who knows the tradition would think it was. We will say this once, plainly: we make no claim that wearing one protects you or changes anything in your life.
Metals, and what the labels really mean
The old pegs were made of nearly anything: wood, bone, crystal, brass, bronze, iron. That range was not carelessness. As Jeff Watt notes at Himalayan Art Resources, some rituals call for a phurba of a particular metal or a particular wood, and the most prized of all were forged from meteorite iron, which Tibetans call thokcha. The Horniman Museum in London holds a small plain iron phurba from Ladakh, 135 millimeters long and 18 wide (1992.190), and suggests a piece that size may have been carried by a lama traveling to perform rituals away from his monastery. A peg made to go in a bag.
Phurba jewelry mostly comes in four metals.
Brass
Copper and zinc, usually around two parts to one. Brass has a long history in Himalayan ritual metalwork. It darkens to brown, can leave a faint green ring on damp skin because of the copper, and sometimes carries a little lead to help it machine. A brass pendant can be perfectly decent. It just needs to be sold as brass.
White metal
A loose trade name for soft alloys of tin, lead, antimony, zinc and the like, which melt at a few hundred degrees and flow into a mould like water. Cheap, sharp on day one, and the name tells you nothing about what is in the piece you are holding.
"Tibetan silver"
Old Tibetan silver often was silver. The phrase today mostly means a white alloy finished to look aged. When seven items sold online as Tibetan silver were tested with X-ray fluorescence, six turned out to be mostly copper, nickel and zinc. Nickel is one of the most common causes of skin allergy, and with a label this vague, lead or arsenic cannot be ruled out. Ways to check are in What Is Tibetan Silver?
Sterling silver
Ninety-two and a half percent silver, the rest usually copper, stamped 925. Sulfur in ordinary air slowly turns its surface to black silver sulfide, and on a carved piece that is welcome. The dark sinks into every recess and stays there, while the high points rub bright against your shirt. After a year, the carving reads more clearly than the day it left the bench.
If a seller says silver, ask to see the 925. It costs nothing to ask.
Cast or hand-carved: what to look for with a loupe
Most phurba pendants are cast. A master is made, a mould is taken, metal is poured. That is no sin. But molten metal shrinks a little as it cools, and a mould has to let go of what it makes, so anything that tucks underneath itself either fills in or tears. On a phurba the losses gather in exactly the places you most want to look: the three faces on the handle, the knots, the serpents on the blade.
Take a loupe, or the macro setting on your phone, and go slowly.
- The walls of a line. A graver leaves a cut with steep sides and often a small bright floor where the steel burnished the silver. Cast lines slump gently into the ground.
- Undercuts. Look for a prong that curls free of the shaft with a sliver of dark behind it, or one serpent crossing another with real space underneath. A mould struggles to release those.
- The eyes. On a handle with three heads, compare them. When each face has its own set of the brow and the pupils are cut crisp, a hand did it. Three soft, identical faces came out of one cavity.
- The back of the blade. Turn it over. A lot of castings are flat or blank behind, and some quietly reduce the blade to two faces. Three faces is the one thing a phurba cannot lose and still be a phurba.
More on this, with photographs of each sign, in Hand-Carved Silver Jewelry: Five Ways to Tell.
Gold on a phurba pendant
Gold on these objects is old. The V&A has an iron-bladed phurba with a handle of gilt copper (IM.42-1909). How the gold gets onto a pendant decides how it will look in five years.
Plating is a film of gold laid on electrically, often over brass. Friction goes to the highest points first, and on a phurba the highest points are the crown and the tip, so that is where the color goes. Vermeil is a thicker layer over sterling rather than base metal, and it lasts longer, but it is still a skin over the whole surface.
Fire-gilding works differently. Gold is laid on and heated to around 900°C, until it fuses into the silver beneath. Gold melts at 1064°C, so the window is narrow, and the metal has to be watched the whole time. Because it is applied area by area, the gold can be put only where the design wants it: on a face, a serpent, a band of beads. The silver around it stays silver. A side-by-side of all three methods is in Gold Vermeil vs Gold Plated vs Fire-Gilded.
Size, weight and the right length of chain
A phurba is long and narrow and it hangs point down, so it behaves differently from a round medallion. Under about 4 centimeters, it looks best fairly high, on a chain of 50 to 55 cm (20 to 22 in). A larger carved piece has weight, and weight wants room. On 60 to 70 cm (24 to 28 in) it settles flat on the breastbone instead of riding up against the collarbone.
Twenty grams is roughly four or five sugar cubes. You notice it on the first day, and after that you mostly don't. Above about 15 grams, use a chain thick enough to carry it, or a good cord, and check the cord now and then where it runs through the bail. The full table of lengths is in the Men's Necklace Length Guide.
Can I wear a phurba?
Yes. Wearing a small image of one is not disrespectful in itself, and small phurbas made to be worn are widely sold. The care is in how you live with it.
If you are not Buddhist, nobody is asking you to become one. What people who hold this object sacred tend to hope for is simpler: that you know what it is. Someone will ask. "It's a ritual peg from Tibet, it pins down what gets in the way, there's no blade on it" is a better answer than "it's a dagger." Keep it out of costumes. More in Can You Wear Buddhist Jewelry If You're Not Buddhist?
If you are Buddhist, your teacher's word on this outranks any jeweler's. Some ask a lama to bless a new piece before wearing it; some don't. Our Consecration page has more on this.
Tibetan etiquette keeps holy images and texts off the floor and as high as is practical, and many people carry that habit over to what hangs around their neck:
- When you take it off, set it on a shelf or a dresser, never on the floor, and don't step over it.
- Wear it above the waist. A sacred image swinging from a belt loop or a key ring is the thing most likely to hurt someone who practices.
- Some people take it off before going into a bathroom, following the advice in etiquette guides not to keep sacred objects in unclean places. Others leave it on. It is a custom some keep, and the choice is yours.
- If the day comes when you stop wearing it, pass it to someone who will, or put it somewhere clean and high. Don't throw it out.
Looking after it
Mostly, wear it. Cloth and skin keep the raised work bright while the recesses go dark. If you want it lighter, run a polishing cloth over the high points only and leave the dark where it lies. Silver dips strip everything back to one flat white, and the carving disappears with the tarnish. Keep any finely carved or stone-set piece out of an ultrasonic cleaner, dry it after swimming or a shower, and store it in a soft pouch so the prong tips don't snag. Step-by-step instructions are in How to Clean Sterling Silver Jewelry Without Losing the Dark in the Carving, and the short version is on our Care page.
The phurba pendant we make
Ours follows the proportions of a phurba type from the Yongle reign of the Ming dynasty, the years when imperial workshops were producing Tibetan ritual bronzes of famously fine quality. We kept the old proportions and built to them. The Phurba Vajrakilaya pendant is S925 sterling silver, carved and engraved by hand, then oxidized and finished by hand.
At the crown, a crossed vajra with four prongs curling in from four directions. Below it the handle carries three heads, each carved on its own with its own face. Garuda is at the top. At Himalayan Art Resources, Jeff Watt notes that Bon phurbas are often topped with a garuda, so the bird has old company up there. Then the Lord of the Charnel Ground. Then Vajrakilaya, right where handle turns into blade, so that the point at the bottom is the point of him. The blade comes out of the open jaws of a makara rather than being fitted on, which is the harder way to model it, because the two forms have to flow through each other without a seam. Nagas run in low relief down all three faces. Between every section there is a band of raised beads, and every bead was cut by itself. The back of the blade is carved as deep 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, so the cutting has to hold the eye on its own. On the 24K Fire-Gilded Edition, gold is fired into the garuda's face, around the beaded collars, into the flames and faces down the handle, and along the serpents on the blade, and natural garnets are set by hand into the makara heads of the crown. After the gold goes on, every gilded line is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so the gold stops exactly at the edge of the serpent and does not flood the undercuts. The process has its own page: Traditional Fire-Gilding.
Both editions measure 65 × 40 × 12 mm (2.6 × 1.6 × 0.5 in) and weigh 20 g (0.7 oz). That is a large pendant by any chain chart, so it comes on a titanium bead chain of about 65 cm (26 in), light and quiet against the skin. You can also choose a silver chain that closes on a carved S-hook with garuda and vajra-head ends. More pieces in the same tradition are in our Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry collection.
Frequently asked questions
Is it disrespectful to wear a phurba necklace?
Not in itself. What tends to upset people is carelessness: leaving it on the floor, wearing it below the waist, or calling it a weapon.
What is the best metal for a phurba pendant?
Sterling silver stamped 925, if you want to know exactly what is against your skin. Be wary of "Tibetan silver" and "white metal," which often contain little or no silver.
What is the difference between a phurba and a kila?
Language only. Phurba is Tibetan and kila is Sanskrit for the same three-sided ritual peg.
Should I take my phurba pendant off in the bathroom?
The silver is fine with water if you dry it afterward. As a matter of custom, some people would rather not take sacred images into a bathroom. It is your call.
Does a phurba pendant need to be blessed?
No. Some Buddhists choose to have a new piece blessed by a lama. You can wear one without it.
The Horniman thinks its little iron peg from Ladakh may have been made to travel, packed in a lama's bag and taken out wherever a ritual needed doing. A pendant travels too, in a smaller way. It goes to work with you and comes home with you, and on most days nobody else sees it under your shirt. It just warms to the heat of your chest and stays there.
Phurba Pendant · Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry
More from the Journal: The Phurba · Vajra Meaning · Garuda in Tibet