A dark blue figure standing in fire, six hands full, an elephant-headed god face down under his feet, and the lineage that carried him from India to the Shang valley and then to every Gelug monastery.
Six-Armed Mahakala is a wrathful protector of Tibetan Buddhism, in Sanskrit Ṣaḍbhuja Mahākāla, "the six-armed Great Black One". Tibetans call him Gonpo Chakdrukpa, mgon po phyag drug pa, the six-armed Protector, and in full the Swift-Acting Wisdom Protector. He is a wrathful form of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. He came to Tibet through Khyungpo Naljor, founder of the Shangpa Kagyu, and the Gelug school later took him as its principal protector. In paintings he is dark blue, one face, three eyes, six arms, standing in a mass of flames on a prone figure with an elephant's head.
Six-Armed Mahakala meaning: the name
Mahā is great. Kāla is black, and also time; the Norbulingka Institute reads the name as "beyond time", or beyond death. In Tibetan he is nag po chen po, the Great Black One, though Rigpa Wiki notes that the usual Tibetan name is simply mgon po, protector.
He is called black and painted blue. Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources (HAR) gives the painter's reason in Tricycle: a black figure loses its contrast and detail, so artists usually make Mahakala very dark blue. Look closely at almost any painting of him and the body is not black at all, but a blue so dark it reads as black from a few steps away.
Watt also makes a point that saves a lot of confusion: Mahakala "is not one individual but rather a class of deities." There are two-armed, four-armed and six-armed Mahakalas, and HAR notes that some six-armed forms are unrelated to this one. What follows is the Shadbhuja, the six-armed Mahakala of the Shangpa lineage.
Where the six-armed form comes from
HAR traces him to the Eight-Chapter Mahakala Tantra, a text of the Kriya, or Action, class, in which the one who asks for the teaching is Hayagriva. Most Mahakalas, HAR explains, are wrathful emanations of the buddha Vajradhara. This one alone is an emanation of Avalokiteshvara. Watt adds that this way of depicting him was popularized in the twelfth century.
Rigpa Wiki, in the Tsadra edition, gives the line of transmission. The main teaching came from the Indian mahasiddha Shavaripa. Khyungpo Naljor, who studied in India with many teachers, chief among them the women Niguma and Sukhasiddhi, received the Mahakala transmissions from Maitripa and Rahula and brought them back to Tibet. The Treasury of Lives records the monastery he founded in the Shang valley of Tsang, Zhangzhong Dorjeden, which gave the tradition its name. His dates are uncertain; sources give several birth years in the eleventh century.
From the Shangpa he spread. HAR says he became popular in the Sakya, Kagyu and Jonang traditions. Jamgön Kongtrul, the nineteenth-century master who partly revived the Shangpa lineage, described two Tibetan branches of the transmission, an upper and a lower. The lower one, Rigpa Wiki notes, ran through the Phagdru and Karma Kagyu and into the Gelug.
Six-Armed Mahakala in the Gelug tradition
Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) received the practice from a teacher named Jagchen Jampa Pal, and that, Rigpa Wiki says, is how the protector became important to the school his students built. HAR calls Shadbhuja the principal protector of the Gelug.
He is one of three. HAR records that Tsongkhapa himself chose the three principal Gelug protectors: Six-Armed Mahakala, Yama Dharmaraja and Vaishravana. They are linked to three kinds of practitioner, greater, middling and lesser, the same three scopes on which Tsongkhapa built the Lamrim Chenmo (see Je Tsongkhapa). HAR's page does not say which protector goes with which scope; the Norbulingka Institute associates Mahakala with the great scope. HAR adds that the triad is "commonly found at the bottom of Gelug painted compositions". Look along the lower edge of a Gelug thangka and you will often find him there.
Six-Armed Mahakala iconography
HAR's description of a nineteenth-century painting from eastern Tibet in the Rubin collection, P1998.32.1 (ground mineral pigment on cotton, 54.6 by 33 centimeters, Palpung school), read together with Watt's notes in Tricycle, gives the standard figure:
- Body. Dark blue, one face, three eyes, bared fangs, hair and beard flowing upward. A red sindura drop on the forehead.
- Crown. Five skulls. On the Rubin painting, HAR adds Akshobhya as the crown.
- First pair of hands. A curved flaying knife in the right and a skull cup in the left, held at the heart.
- Second pair. A mala of dry human skulls in the right, a trident in the left.
- Third pair. A damaru, the double-sided hand drum, in the right, and a lasso in the left.
- Dress and ornaments. A tiger skin at the waist, a garland of heads, bone ornaments and snakes, small bells at the hands and feet.
- Under the feet. A prone, elephant-headed god, Ganapati.
- Setting. A sandalwood tree behind him, and around him a blazing mass of fire.
Paintings vary in small ways. On some, including the black-ground painting described below, he also holds an elephant skin stretched behind his shoulders with two of his hands. On P1998.32.1 he stands with both legs together; on the black-ground painting the right leg is bent and the left extended.
The skull cup and the knife
These are the first two hands, the ones at his heart, and they belong together. The Rubin's glossary reads the knife, held by a male deity, as the method aspect of enlightenment, and the skull cup as a mind filled with the bliss of seeing reality as it is. Watt notes that the cup holds a heart with blood running from it, and that the blood usually stands for the four maras, the defeated enemies of awakening.
The trident and the lasso
The trident is Shiva's weapon, Watt writes, but Buddhist painters draw it more like a three-pronged vajra. He describes the lasso in the lowest left hand as "more like a bola" than a noose: it catches an obstacle and pulls it in, and then the trident subdues it. The two hands work as a pair, one above the other, on the same side of the body.
The other right hands hold the damaru, whose two halves the Rubin reads as the union of two aspects of enlightenment and whose sound as impermanence, and the skull mala, which Watt says is symbolic, not a picture of real skulls.
The snakes and the crown
The eight snakes he wears, in Watt's reading, are the eight great nagas, the serpent spirits who are believed to cause disease, drought and famine when they are disturbed; wearing them shows they are under his control (more on the nagas in The Naga). On the crown, sources differ. Watt reads the five skulls as the five aggregates and the five wisdom buddhas. The Norbulingka Institute reads them as the five afflictions turned into the five wisdoms.
What do the six arms of Mahakala mean?
Watt's answer is short: "The six arms generally represent the six perfections." The six perfections, or pāramitā, are the bodhisattva's practices of generosity, ethical discipline, patience, effort, meditative concentration and wisdom. That fits a protector who is a form of Avalokiteshvara: six arms for the six things a bodhisattva has to bring to perfection. We found no reputable source that assigns each perfection to a particular hand, so we do not.
Why is Mahakala trampling Ganesha?
The figure underfoot is Ganapati, or Vinayaka, whom many readers know as Ganesha. In Watt's description he lies face down and holds a radish, his favorite food. The Rubin's label on its fifteenth-century Six-Armed Mahakala, C2002.34.4, says Mahakala "tramples obstacles represented by the prone figure of an elephant-headed god." Watt calls Vinayaka the deity of obstacles. Here he is the part being stood on. We wrote about Ganesha's own iconography in Ganesha's broken tusk.
Why is a protector of compassion so fierce?
Two sources reach for the same picture. Watt writes that Mahakala's wrathful appearance refers "not to aggression or anger but to intensity", like a gentle mother who looks fierce when her child runs into traffic. The Rubin's label on C2002.34.4 says the figure "manifests the emotion that a mother might have to protect her child from danger." In the Rubin's wider definition, wrathful deities are protectors of the Buddhist teachings who destroy obstacles on the path to awakening.
Rigpa Wiki also makes a distinction that matters here. Mahakala is a supermundane protector, understood as an enlightened being. Mundane protectors, many of them local spirits sworn to guard the teachings, are still beings within samsara.
The retinue
On many paintings he is surrounded. Rigpa Wiki lists five figures in the immediate retinue: Remati, a form of Shri Devi often shown as his consort, Kshetrapala, Jinamitra, Takkiraja and Trakshe. Beyond them lies a retinue of seventy-five, among them the eight great nagas, the planets and the four great kings.
On P1998.32.1, HAR places them: Shri Devi on a mule with a stick and a bag of disease, Kshetrapala riding a black bear, and Trakshe, lord of the maras, on a black horse with white hooves, in a long black silk cloak and boots.
Six-Armed Mahakala on a black ground
The black-ground thangka, nagthang, began with protectors. Watt traces it to tantric texts, including versions of the Mahakala Tantra, that tell the painter to work on charnel-ground cloth with funerary ash. The types of ground are set out in What Is a Thangka?
The Rubin holds an eighteenth-century Sakya example, P1996.11.1, in fine gold line on a black ground on cotton, 73.7 by 54 centimeters. HAR's description reads it figure by figure. At the center, Six-Armed Mahakala holds the knife and the skull cup at his heart, the skull garland, the trident and an upraised elephant skin, and the drum and lasso, standing on the elephant-headed figure inside "the fires of pristine awareness". Around him crowd other protectors, among them Panjara Mahakala with a stick across his forearms, a four-faced Mahakala with four dakinis, and the mounted Three Kings of the Sakya. Two lamas in red pandita hats sit above.
On black, a painter has only line. Every one of those dozens of hands, implements and animals has to be closed by a gold edge fine enough to read but strong enough not to drown. That is the discipline of the form.
How to hang a protector thangka respectfully
The general courtesies are in How to Hang a Thangka: high rather than low, never on the floor, never toward the feet, never in a bathroom. A protector adds a few things worth knowing.
- Protectors have their own rooms. The Rubin explains that most Tibetan monasteries keep a separate chapel for wrathful protectors, the gonkhang, where rituals and offerings are made to the guardians of the teachings. The Rubin's own painted wooden doors from Kham, C2014.3a-h, probably stood at the entrance to a small Mahakala shrine, and their painted images signaled restricted access. In a monastery the protector is kept apart from the main hall.
- The buddha takes the center. Venerable Thubten Chodron writes that the center figure on a shrine "is always the Buddha", with other deities to the side. In Gelug paintings, as HAR notes, the protectors sit along the bottom. A home can follow the same order: a protector beside or below a buddha or teacher, not above them.
- It is not decoration to frighten. The fierce face is read in the tradition as compassion at full strength. Hang it where it can be looked at quietly, not as a novelty.
- Practice belongs to a lineage. Mahakala practice is taught within the Shangpa, Gelug and other lineages. If you want to do more than look at the painting, ask a teacher of that tradition.
Those are the customs and readings of the tradition. A thangka is an image made with care; we do not claim it protects the person who hangs it or the house it hangs in.
Our Six-Armed Mahakala thangka
Our Six-Armed Mahakala Black and Gold Thangka is one of the thangkas in our collection.
He has a fierce face with three round eyes and bared fangs, a crown of five white skulls, and hair rising like smoke. His six arms fan out, the two principal hands meeting at the heart over a skull cup. Garlands, jeweled armlets and a snake ornament are set with red glass crystals. He stands on a white elephant-headed figure lying on a lotus and sun seat. Smaller attendant figures stand in the flames, among them a red figure at the upper left, with more small figures at the base. The black ground is almost entirely filled with flames and clouds drawn in fine gold line, and the piece shown is framed in our Ink & Gold brocade, black and silver.
Like all our thangkas, it is our own drawing, kept to traditional iconometric proportions and printed on heavy card. It is not hand-painted and not mineral pigment. Elderly lay Buddhists who practice at a temple finish it by hand there, setting glass crystals one by one and tracing the outlines in gold glitter, which is not gilding; each piece takes about two days. The frame is 55 by 71 centimeters around an image of 40.2 by 56.2 centimeters, with a silk brocade frame-within-a-frame, a wood frame and an acrylic front. Part of every order goes to that temple, so every thangka is also an offering.
He also appears, smaller, on our Green Tara with the Five Buddhas and Protectors: Six-Armed Mahakala amid flames along the bottom, with Palden Lhamo riding her mule across the sea on one side and Vaishravana on a white snow lion on the other, protectors at the base, where Gelug paintings so often place them. The rest are in the thangka collection.
Six-Armed Mahakala questions
Who is Six-Armed Mahakala?
A wrathful protector of Tibetan Buddhism, Gonpo Chakdrukpa in Tibetan, understood as a wrathful form of Avalokiteshvara. He is the special protector of the Shangpa Kagyu and the principal protector of the Gelug.
What do the six arms of Mahakala represent?
According to Jeff Watt of HAR, the six arms generally represent the six perfections: generosity, discipline, patience, effort, concentration and wisdom.
What does Six-Armed Mahakala hold?
A curved knife and a skull cup at the heart, a skull mala and a trident, and a damaru drum and a lasso. Some paintings add an elephant skin held up behind him.
Why is Mahakala blue if his name means black?
Painters use a very dark blue because a black figure loses its contrast and detail.
Who is under Mahakala's feet?
Ganapati, or Vinayaka, the elephant-headed god of obstacles, lying face down. The Rubin reads him as the obstacles being trampled.
Where should a Mahakala thangka be hung?
High, clean and quiet, beside or below any buddha or teacher image rather than above it. Monasteries keep protectors in their own chapel, the gonkhang.
Small bells
In HAR's reading of the Palpung painting there is a detail most people walk past: small bells at his hands and feet. Somewhere in eastern Tibet, in the nineteenth century, a painter drew them, a few strokes each, on a figure already crowded with fire and weapons. They are small enough to leave out. Nobody did.
May whatever stands in the way of kindness be moved aside.
Six-Armed Mahakala Black and Gold Thangka · Green Tara with the Five Buddhas and Protectors · Thangka collection
More from the Journal: What Is a Thangka? · How to Hang a Thangka · Je Tsongkhapa · The Naga
More thangka deities: Green Tara · Yellow Jambhala · Kurukulla