A red buddha holding a vase, a white goddess with eyes in her palms, a three-faced goddess seated inside a stupa, and the reasons Tibetan painters kept putting them in the same picture.
The Three Long-Life Deities are Amitayus, White Tara and Ushnishavijaya. Tibetans call the group tse lha nam sum, written Tse Lha Nam Sum, "the three deities of life". Amitayus is a red buddha holding a vase of the nectar of immortality. White Tara is a white goddess with seven eyes. Ushnishavijaya, known in Tibetan as Namgyalma, is white too, with three faces and eight arms, and she sits inside a stupa. Himalayan Art Resources calls them the most popular and most often depicted longevity deities in Tantric Buddhism and its art, and points out that the set itself was put together in Tibet.
The Three Long-Life Deities: who they are and where the set comes from
Each of the three came out of India separately, with its own texts and its own teachers. Grouping them was a Tibetan habit. HAR's study page on Ushnishavijaya says the three "were not formulated in India" and became popular as a Tibetan iconographic convention. Jeff Watt, who wrote HAR's pages on the long-life deities, adds that each deity has many forms and that dozens of transmission lineages reached Tibet from India, alongside the treasure revelations, terma, discovered in Tibet itself.
Their Tibetan names, which practice texts use:
- Amitayus: Tsepakmé, tshe dpag med, "boundless life".
- White Tara: Drolkar, sgrol dkar, the white liberator. Her Sanskrit name is Sitatara.
- Ushnishavijaya: Tsuktor Namgyalma, gtsug tor rnam par rgyal ma, usually shortened to Namgyalma.
The Rigpa Shedra glossary lists them together as the three deities of long life, and lists two more figures in long-life practice: Tsendali, the consort of Amitayus, and the adept Thangtong Gyalpo. Thangtong Gyalpo matters to the paintings. The Rubin Museum notes that he is often shown with the three, as an elderly man, and that he is known for creating medicinal formulas for healing and long life.
Amitayus, the buddha of boundless life
How Amitayus is drawn
HAR quotes the description written by Sakya Tridzin Kunga Tashi (1656–1711). Amitayus is red. He has one face, smiling, with long eyes that look on beings with compassion. His hair is worn in tufts. He wears the full dress of the sambhogakaya, the enjoyment body, silks and jewel ornaments, and the Rubin's glossary describes him as crowned. His two hands rest in his lap in the gesture of meditation, and in them sits a long-life vase filled with the nectar of immortality. He sits with his legs folded in vajra posture.
Dudjom Rinpoche's short daily practice of Amitayus, translated by Adam Pearcey on Lotsawa House, adds the seat: a lotus and a moon disc. When you look at him, look at the hands. The vase sits upright in the cupped palms, and it is the attribute that tells you this is Amitayus and not the monk-buddha with a bowl.
The sutra behind him
The text most closely tied to him is the Aparimitāyurjñāna Sūtra, the sutra of boundless life and wisdom, which Tibetans call the Tsedo. 84000, which translated both of its Tibetan canonical versions in 2021, summarizes the setting. The Buddha is staying in the Jetavana grove at Shravasti and tells Manjushri of a buddha realm far above our world, where the buddha Aparimitāyurjñāna lives. The sutra contains a dharani, a long formula for recitation.
It was copied on a scale that is hard to picture. Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney's study of the Dunhuang manuscripts in the British Library documents over 1,500 Tibetan copies of this one sutra, produced in ninth-century Dunhuang for the Tibetan emperor. The scribes, editors and administrators who made them came from several peoples, and the authors trace how the copying practice changed within a short time during the 820s. Fifteen hundred copies of one text, each one written out by hand.
The lineages: Siddharajni, Rechungpa, Maratika
One of the Sarma lineages runs through a woman. Her Tibetan name is Machig Drubpai Gyalmo, "the single mother, realized queen", and her Sanskrit name Siddharajni. An article published by Jamyang Buddhist Centre in London tells the story as the tradition does. Milarepa's disciple Rechungpa (the Treasury of Lives gives 1085–1161 in most entries) went to India and was warned that he would die young unless he received a practice for extending life. He received the yogas of Amitayus from Siddharajni, practiced them, and brought them back to Milarepa. Some, the same article notes, identify Siddharajni with Mandarava.
HAR gives the Kagyu line in its description of a painting of Amitayus (HAR 4548) as Amitayus, Siddharajni, the adept Tipupa, Rechungpa, Milarepa, Gampopa, Pagmodrupa, and the painting shows its first links in the upper border: Siddharajni at top center, a figure in white garments that is probably Tipupa, then Milarepa and Rechungpa. HAR calls this the Rechung tradition. The Treasury of Lives records that Milarepa and Rechungpa meditated together in the country around Mount Kailash.
An older story belongs to Padmasambhava. The Treasury of Lives notes that the caves of Maratika are revered as the place where Padmasambhava and Mandarava had visions of Amitayus, after three months of long-life rituals there. HAR adds that in the Nyingma school Amitayus has both kama, oral lineages, and terma, revealed treasure lineages.
The Amitayus mantra
The short Amitayus mantra in Dudjom Rinpoche's daily practice is oṃ amaraṇi jīvantaye svāhā, as Lotsawa House transliterates it; the Tibetan spelling reads jīvantiye, and it is often written om amarani jivantiye soha. The long mantra, the dharani from the sutra, begins namo ratna trayāya, oṃ namo bhagavate aparimita āyur jñāna, as the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive prints it. That archive records that Trulshik Rinpoche advised students to recite the long mantra 100,000 times for the health of their teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche, and that they recited more than 510,000.
Amitayus and Amitabha
The names are nearly the same. Amitabha Buddha is Measureless Light, Amitayus is Measureless Life, and in Tibet they are usually understood as two bodies of one buddha. HAR puts it plainly: Amitabha and Amitayus "are the same person". Amitabha is the emanation body, the nirmanakaya, dressed as a monk with a begging bowl. Amitayus is the enjoyment body, crowned and jeweled, holding the vase. The Jamyang article adds a date. By about the sixteenth century the two had become firmly joined in Tibetan practice, and the dharani of the Tsedo came to be used for the single figure Tibetans call Tsepakmé.
The joining shows up in the paintings. In the eight hands of Ushnishavijaya, one holds a white lotus with Amitabha seated on it. So in a long-life painting the buddha of the western Pure Land can appear twice: crowned as Amitayus, and very small in the hand of the goddess.
White Tara, the seven-eyed
How White Tara is drawn
HAR quotes Sachen Ngagwang Kunga Lodro (1729–1783), and his description is precise enough to paint from. She is white like an autumn moon, radiant like a stainless crystal. She has one face and three eyes, and an eye on each palm and each sole: the "seven eyes of pristine awareness". She has the appearance of a girl of sixteen.
- Right hand. Resting on the right knee, palm out, in the gesture of supreme generosity, varada mudra. The eye is painted in the open palm.
- Left hand. At her heart, thumb and forefinger holding the stem of a white utpala whose petals open at her ear. The stem divides in three: a full flower in the middle, a flower already setting fruit on the right, a bud on the left. Kunga Lodro says they stand for the buddhas of past, present and future.
- Dress. Jewel ornaments, upper garments of different silks, a red silk lower garment.
- Seat. Legs in vajra posture, on a moon disc and a pink lotus. HAR's description of a Rubin painting adds the blue lotus pond the seat rises from.
That stem is easy to skip past and hard to draw: one stem carrying three stages of a flower at once, kept inside the curve of the arm. Her seven eyes, her long-life practice and how to tell her from Green Tara are in White Tara.
Her lineages
HAR describes White Tara as a longevity-bestowing emanation of Green Tara, belonging to the Kriya class of tantra and practiced in every school of Tibetan Buddhism. Watt names four Sarma lineages for her: from Bari Lotsawa, from Atisha, from the Kashmiri pandita Shakya Shribhadra and from Nyen Lotsawa Dharma Drak. The long-life form is called the Wish-fulfilling Wheel.
Atisha (982–1054) wrote Tara sadhanas, and Wikipedia's survey of Tara gives his White Tara mantra for healing and longevity as oṃ tāre tuttāre ture śāntiṃ kuru svāhā. A common long-life version adds a request in the middle: oṃ tāre tuttāre ture mama āyuḥ puṇya jñāna puṣṭiṃ kuru svāhā, asking for increase of life, merit and wisdom.
One later revelation pulls the three deities together in a single practice. Rigpa Shedra records that Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo revealed the Chimé Pakmé Nyingtik, "the heart essence of the sublime lady of immortality", as a mind treasure in 1855, after a vision of White Tara. It accomplishes the three deities of longevity together. Its main deity is White Tara in union with a consort, which Rigpa calls highly unusual.
Tibetan tradition, as Wikipedia's survey of Tara records, also holds that White Tara manifested as the Chinese princess Kongjo, better known as Wencheng, and Green Tara as the princess Bhrikuti.
Ushnishavijaya, Namgyalma
How Ushnishavijaya is drawn
Her name means "the victorious one of the ushnisha", the rise on the crown of a buddha's head. HAR translates it "Victorious Crown Ornament", and the Met's catalog describes her as the embodiment of the ushnisha itself. The description most often quoted is by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892). She is the white of an autumn moon, with three faces, white, yellow and blue, and three large eyes on each face. She sits in vajra posture in silks and jewels. Her eight hands, as he lists them:
- Right, first: a crossed double vajra, the vishvavajra.
- Right, second: a white lotus with Amitabha seated on it.
- Right, third: an arrow.
- Right, fourth: the gesture of supreme generosity.
- Left, first: a vajra lasso.
- Left, second: a bow.
- Left, third: the gesture of granting protection.
- Left, fourth: in meditative equipoise, holding a vase of nectar.
She sits inside a stupa. In the outer circle of the stupa, on her right, white Avalokiteshvara sits on a moon holding a lotus; on her left, blue Vajrapani stands on a sun holding an utpala topped with a vajra. More on the shape she sits inside is in our piece on the stupa.
The dharani sutra
Her text is the Uṣṇīṣa Vijaya Dhāraṇī Sūtra. Its story, as Wikipedia summarizes it, concerns a young god named Supratishthita who hears that he has seven days to live, to be followed by seven animal rebirths, then hell, then a poor and blind human birth. The god Shakra asks the Buddha for help, and the Buddha teaches the dharani. Supratishthita practices it for six days and nights.
It was translated into Chinese eight times between 679 and 988. Buddhapalita's late seventh-century version became the standard one; a legend says he met Manjushri in the form of an old man on Mount Wutai, who sent him to bring the text to China. Murals at Dunhuang show that story. Buddhapalita's text was cut into a great many stone pillars in China. In Tibet the dharani is often called the Namgyalma mantra, it is counted among five purifying mantras, and it is sometimes used in rites for the dead. Among the benefits the sutra itself lists is lengthening of life.
A Qing bronze at the Met
The Met's gilt brass Buddhist Deity, Ushnishavijaya, accession 2007.75a, b, late seventeenth to eighteenth century, is 17.8 centimeters high. Look at the hands as the catalog reads them. Upper right, a tiny seated buddha. Upper left, a vajra hanging from a long cord, the lasso. Then the bow and arrow. Then, at her chest, what the cataloguers call a four-pronged vajra; in Kyentse Wangpo's text that hand holds the crossed double vajra. The lowest pair give generosity and hold a covered vase. The Met dates the rise of goddesses like her in Indian Buddhist practice to the seventh and eighth centuries, and reads this figure as evidence of close ties between Tibetan, Mongolian and Chinese Buddhists under the Qing.
How the three appear together in painting
A common arrangement puts Amitayus in the center with the two goddesses below him. A nineteenth-century thangka from Buryatia in the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion, inventory Ж-1336, 32.5 by 25.5 centimeters, is a clean example. Amitayus sits in the middle on a moon disc on a lotus, red and jeweled, the vessel of immortality in his lap. Below him, Ushnishavijaya at the left and White Tara at the right.
The center can change. At the Rubin, F1996.32.5, an eighteenth-century Gelug painting on cotton, 66 by 44.5 centimeters, puts White Tara in the middle and moves the others to the top: white Amitayus at top center with his vase, a standing red Amitayus with a begging bowl at top left, and Ushnishavijaya at top right. Below are Green Tara, Marichi and Ekajati. HAR records the commission. A patron named Yeshe Lobzang Tenpa, perhaps the eighth Tatsak Rinpoche (1760–1810), dedicated the merit of the painting to ending suffering from untimely death and to long life. On the back is an inscription in the shape of a stupa, with handprints and the syllables om ah hum.
And Ushnishavijaya can take the center herself. The Rubin's F1998.17.1, from western Tibet in the fifteenth century, 50.8 by 47.6 centimeters, shows her inside her stupa with Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani, Vairochana in front of the spire directly above her head, and a register of buddhas across the top that ends with White Tara at the right. HAR notes that the bottom register was removed before the museum acquired it, for damage of unknown kind. At the Penn Museum, a nineteenth-century Tibetan thangka, 51-4-133, 93 by 64 centimeters, shows her with two attendants and two nagas above, pouring down water.
Sometimes the three are a small row at the top of a painting about something else. The Rubin's Beneficial and Auspicious Tara, from the family of Dagyab Rinpoche in eastern Tibet and given to the museum by Michael Henss in 2014, has Amitayus, Ushnishavijaya and White Tara across its upper register with Thangtong Gyalpo beside them.
Why together? The sources give practical reasons rather than a doctrine. The three were the most popular longevity deities, so a painting made for long life called on all of them. Paintings were commissioned with that dedication, like the Rubin's White Tara. Practices such as the Chimé Pakmé Nyingtik accomplish the three together. And the Jamyang article notes that these practices are used to pray for the long life of teachers and benefactors as well as one's own.
Long-life practice as the traditions describe it
The Tibetan term is tsé drup, tshe sgrub, Sanskrit āyuḥsādhana. Rigpa Shedra defines it as the part of Vajrayana practice that uses the methods of secret mantra to increase one's own or others' lifespan. In a teaching it quotes, Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche gives the reason: the human body is the best of the six kinds of birth, a boat for crossing the river of suffering, and a long life gives time to practice. Among the methods he lists are long-life pills made to instructions in treasure texts, and, above those, visualizing the deity and reciting the mantra. Sogyal Rinpoche, also quoted there, adds the release of animals due for slaughter.
Long life is also something students ask for on their teachers' behalf. Rigpa describes the tenshyuk, "stable remaining": students offer representations of enlightened body, speech and mind and request the teacher to stay in the world. The Jamyang article describes the aim of Amitayus practice as twofold: a long life in which to practice, and ultimately the awakened state of Amitayus himself. It notes that the Drikung Kagyu give an Amitayus empowerment at the Monkey Year teachings, held every twelve years.
These are the traditions' own descriptions, for people practicing within them under a teacher. We describe them; we make no claim that a painting of these deities lengthens anyone's life.
Do we make a thangka of the Three Long-Life Deities?
Not at present, and we should correct something. We first described one of our Amitabha thangkas as showing the Three Long-Life Deities above him. Looking again, closely, the three figures at the top are Shakyamuni Buddha on the left, Je Tsongkhapa in the centre and the Medicine Buddha on the right. That painting is now named for what it shows: Amitabha with Shakyamuni, Tsongkhapa & Medicine Buddha. It puts Amitabha at the center, with two naginis below, one on each side, the female water beings we wrote about in the naga, and Yellow Jambhala at the center, drawn in gold and silver line on a black ground.
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. It is then finished by hand at a temple by elderly lay Buddhists who practice there: glass crystals set one by one, outlines traced in gold glitter, about two days for each piece. The crystals are glass and the glitter is not gilding. 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.
How the old paintings are made is described in what a thangka is. The rest of the collection is in the thangka collection.
Long-life deity questions
Who are the Three Long-Life Deities?
Amitayus, White Tara and Ushnishavijaya, grouped in Tibet as tse lha nam sum. HAR notes that the grouping is a Tibetan construction; each deity came from India separately.
What does Tse Lha Nam Sum mean?
"The three long-life deities". Tse is life, lha deity, nam sum the three.
What is the Amitayus mantra?
The short mantra in Dudjom Rinpoche's daily practice is om amarani jivantiye svaha. The long mantra is the dharani of the Aparimitāyurjñāna Sūtra, which opens namo ratna trayāya, om namo bhagavate aparimita āyur jñāna.
What is the difference between Amitayus and Amitabha?
In Tibetan art Amitabha wears a monk's robe and holds a bowl; Amitayus is crowned and jeweled and holds a long-life vase. HAR describes them as one buddha in two bodies, emanation and enjoyment.
Why does White Tara have seven eyes?
Her iconographic texts give her a third eye on the forehead and an eye on each palm and sole, which Sachen Ngagwang Kunga Lodro calls the seven eyes of pristine awareness.
Why does Ushnishavijaya sit in a stupa?
The stupa is part of her description in Kyentse Wangpo's text, with Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani in its outer circle. A Met note on a painting of her links the stupa, a funerary monument, to overcoming death through awakening.
Is Namgyalma the same as Ushnishavijaya?
Yes. Namgyalma is the short Tibetan name, from Tsuktor Namgyalma. Her long dharani is often called the Namgyalma mantra.
The handprints
On the back of the Rubin's White Tara there is an inscription laid out in the shape of a stupa, the three syllables, and handprints. HAR doesn't say whose. The patron's dedication on that painting asked for an end to untimely death. Someone, more than two centuries ago, put both hands flat on the cotton behind the goddess and left them there.
May you have the time you need, and use it well.
Amitabha with Shakyamuni, Tsongkhapa & Medicine Buddha · Amitabha Buddha Thangka · Amitabha Black and Gold Thangka · Thangka collection
More from the Journal: What Is a Thangka? · Amitabha Buddha · What Is a Stupa? · The Naga · Kang Rinpoche
Also in the thangka series: How to Hang a Thangka: Placement, Etiquette and Care