A bell and a scepter the Met files as one musical instrument, a peg that always points down, and a vajra that came out of a cave in Bhutan with a bell and a phurba beside it.
The three Tibetan ritual implements people most often mix up are the vajra, the bell and the phurba. Put them side by side on a table and they look like close cousins: bronze, pronged, heavy for their size, and none of them with a cutting edge. The vajra (dorje) is held upright in the right hand. The bell (drilbu, or ghanta in Sanskrit) goes in the left, and the two are treated as a single object. The phurba (kila) works alone, point down, and its job is to fix things where they are.
Once you know which hand each one belongs to, and which way it points, you will not confuse them again.
Why Tibetan ritual implements come in pairs
The idea underneath most of these objects is that the path needs two things at the same moment. One is method, upaya: compassion that actually gets up and does something. The other is wisdom, prajna, the insight that sees through the solid self we keep building. Compassion that cannot see clearly does harm with good intentions. Clear sight with no warmth goes cold. So the tradition puts one in each hand and does not let you set either down.
Method goes in the right hand. Wisdom goes in the left. Encyclopedias also describe the pair as male and female principles, and you will meet those words on museum labels.
The vajra (dorje)
Vajra means thunderbolt and diamond in the same breath: the thing that splits anything, and the thing nothing can split. It began as the weapon of the storm god Indra. Buddhism kept the shape and turned it inward, so that it describes a mind rather than a strike. The long story is in Vajra Meaning: The Tibetan Dorje.
Hold one and the first thing you notice is that it is the same at both ends. A sphere at the waist. Two lotuses opening away from it in opposite directions. Around each lotus mouth, makara heads, the water creature of Himalayan art, jaws open and snouts curling back, and out of those jaws come the outer prongs. On the common five-pronged form, four of them bend inward and meet a straight central prong near the tip. They close like a bud. Nine-pronged vajras are most associated with the Nyingma school, five-pronged with the later Sarma schools.
Every part of it has been given a reading. Writing for the Rubin Museum's Project Himalayan Art, Karma Phuntsho explains that on the five-pronged dorje the five upper prongs stand for the buddhas of the five families, the five lower prongs for the five kinds of pristine wisdom, the eight lotus petals above and below for eight bodhisattvas and eight female deities, and the central hub for Vajrasattva. A thing small enough to close your hand around is carrying a whole assembly.
The bell (drilbu, or ghanta)
The bell is built to answer the vajra. Look at the top of its handle: half a vajra, one set of prongs and a single lotus, cut off where the other end should be. Wisdom is never shown without a piece of method attached to it. That is the plainest way the object can say it.
Just below the prongs, above the cup, there is usually a small calm face. Himalayan Art Resources identifies it, in general, as Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom pictured as a goddess. Some museum records simply say a bodhisattva. On one drilbu in the collection of National Museums Liverpool, the cataloguer noted only that the face was well worn.
The cup itself is where casters spent their patience. A typical drilbu has a band of tiny vajras running round the shoulder and another round the rim, and between them a wreath of monster faces hung with garlands. Inside, a clapper. The reading is simple and rather beautiful. The hollow is emptiness, the open space everything appears in. The clapper is form. Ring it and you hear them meet. The Rubin's iconography notes put it in one line: the ring of the bell is said to be the sound of emptiness. And the note begins to die the moment it starts, which anyone who has rung one has heard for themselves. The bell in other traditions, from Alpine herds to shop doors, is the subject of Why We Hung a Bell Inside a House.
One object in two hands
The Metropolitan Museum owns a bronze pair from nineteenth-century Tibet, possibly from Derge (accession 89.4.1443a, b). The bell stands 18.4 cm tall; the dorje is 12.7 cm long. They arrived in 1889 as part of the Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, which says something about how such pairs first reached Western museums: as things that make a sound. The catalog entry today goes further. It says the bell and scepter are usually regarded as one object, used together in recitation, bell in the left hand and dorje in the right, with both hands moving through set gestures that act as a commentary on the words.
At certain moments the wrists cross at the heart, vajra over bell. You can see the same gesture frozen in metal and paint. Vajradhara sits with his hands crossed at the chest, holding both. Vajrasattva, white and upright, keeps the vajra at his heart and lets the bell rest at his hip.
The double vajra (vishvavajra)
Run one vajra through another at a right angle and you get the vishvavajra, the double or crossed vajra: four full heads, pointing everywhere at once. It is rarely held. It is something you stand on. In Buddhist cosmology it lies beneath Mount Meru, and in a mandala the ground itself is a great double vajra. Turn over a Himalayan bronze statue and you will often find one engraved across the sealed base, for the same reason.
The phurba (kila)
This is the one that gets mistaken for a weapon. Kila is Sanskrit for a stake or a peg. The blade has three flat faces meeting at a single point, and you can run a thumb down any edge without harm, because there is no edge. It goes into the ground. The full story, from Samye to Vajrakilaya, is in The Phurba: Why Tibet's Ritual Dagger Has Three Faces and No Edge.
Read one from the top down. A pommel, often three faces or a horse's head. A handle, very often a vajra or a column of knots. A makara at the join, and the blade coming out of its jaws rather than being fitted to the handle. Then the three faces, frequently with serpents twisting down them. Each of those parts gets its own close look in Parts of a Phurba: Makara, Knots and Three Faces.
The three faces answer the three poisons the tradition finds at the root of suffering: attachment, aversion and delusion. They are meant to come down together, so the blade gives them one point to meet at.
The phurba belongs to Vajrakilaya, the wrathful deity whose three faces crown the handle of the ritual phurba. Himalayan Art Resources describes his defining feature as the peg held pointing downward between his two main hands at the heart. In ritual the phurba is pressed point first into earth, sheathed, or stood upright in a bowl of rice or grain. By tradition only those initiated into its practice wield it. It is never turned on a person; what it pins, in the Buddhist reading, is what stands between a person and waking up.
Phurba vs vajra: telling them apart
Look at the ends first. A vajra is the same top and bottom, while a phurba has a top and a point, and below its handle there is a blade, triangular in section, where a vajra would only have more prongs. Then look at which way it is held. Vajras stand up. Phurbas point down, in the hand and on the shrine, every time.
The confusion is understandable, and the old makers invited it. Many phurbas use a vajra as their handle. The deity's name begins with the word. You could think of the phurba as the vajra's force given one direction and told to stay. The bell is easy by comparison: it is hollow, it has a clapper, and its handle stops at half a vajra. If it rings, it is the bell.
A vajra, a bell and a phurba, found together
In northeastern Bhutan there is a cave called Senge Dzong. According to Aja Lam Dorje, a patriarch of the lineage, the treasure revealer Dorje Lingpa (1346–1405) brought out of it a dorje, a bell and a phurba, all three together. They belong to the class of objects called terma, hidden treasures held to have been concealed in the eighth century by Padmasambhava and found again centuries later.
Their fates split. The dorje, iron with cold gold, 15.5 cm long, is kept today at Trashigang Dzong in eastern Bhutan. The bell, a patinated bronze with faces on the handle and a vajra-shaped pommel, passed to the patriarch's son, Lam Kesang Chophel. The phurba was reportedly lost in a temple fire.
Karma Phuntsho, who tells the story, is careful about it. Treasure objects carry special status, he notes, and so many are claimed falsely; there is no settled way to authenticate them. But he also records how such pieces are actually held: as community relics and family heirlooms, highly revered and cherished. That is the part that stays with you. A set of three, one lost to fire, the other two kept by people who still know where they came from.
Two more on the shrine: the curved knife and the damaru
The kartika, Tibetan drigug, is the one that does cut. It is a short flaying knife with a crescent blade ending in a hook, often with a vajra for a handle. Dakinis hold it in the right hand, with a skull cup, the kapala, in the left: method and wisdom again, in a fiercer key. What it is understood to sever is clinging to a self, along with the obscurations that block the path.
The damaru is a small two-headed hand drum. In Vajrayana ritual it is the usual right-hand partner to the bell in the left, played by a quick twist of the wrist that swings two beads on cords against the heads. Chöd practitioners use a larger, rounder drum, usually of wood. Some damaru are made from two skull caps joined at the crown; these are no longer sourced from India, and their export from Nepal is banned.
Tibetan ritual objects compared
| Implement | Other names | Shape | Hand | Stands for | How it is used |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vajra | Dorje | Symmetrical scepter, sphere at center, five or nine prongs at each end | Right | Method; compassion in action | Held upright with the bell; gestures during recitation |
| Bell | Drilbu, ghanta | Hollow cup with clapper; half-vajra handle, usually with a face of Prajnaparamita | Left | Wisdom; emptiness | Rung with the vajra; the two crossed at the heart |
| Double vajra | Vishvavajra, crossed vajra | Two vajras at right angles, four heads | Rarely hand-held | Ground that cannot be shifted | Engraved on statue bases; the ground of a mandala |
| Phurba | Kila, purba, phurpa | Peg with a three-sided blade, single point, no edge | In Vajrakilaya's images, both main hands at the heart, point down | The three poisons pinned at once | Pressed into earth or stood in grain to fix the ritual ground |
| Curved knife | Kartika, drigug | Crescent blade ending in a hook, often vajra handle | Right, skull cup in left | Cutting clinging to self | Held by dakinis and some wrathful deities |
| Hand drum | Damaru | Small two-headed drum, beads on cords | Right, bell in left | Keeps time and accent in recitation | Twisted at the wrist; larger wooden form in Chöd |
At the bench
We are silversmiths. A ritual vajra and bell on a practitioner's shrine is a different kind of object from anything we make, and we do not claim our pieces protect anyone or do anything on their own. What we can do is take the forms seriously.
Under a 40× microscope, a makara stops being decoration. You see that its upper lip has to curl back far enough to read as a snout, and that if one jaw sits half a millimeter off from its opposite, the whole vajra looks wrong at arm's length. On the Garuda Vajra Pendant there are ten of those heads, five at each end, mirrored, around a garuda's face where the sphere would be. It is 60 mm tip to tip and 33 g, heavy enough that it hangs straight and cool against the chest and then slowly takes on the warmth of the person wearing it. The eight garnets at the roots of the prongs were set after the carving was finished, the harder order of work, so the setting follows the silver instead of the other way round.
The Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant is the double vajra: four five-pronged heads, sixteen makara, a garnet in every one, carved on the back and edges as well as the face. Four arms had to agree with each other four times. In the fire-gilded edition the gold is fused into the silver at about 900°C, close enough to gold's melting point of 1064°C that the window is narrow, and then every line is re-cut by hand so the gold stops exactly at the edge of a lotus petal. That edition takes about fourteen days at the bench.
The Phurba Pendant follows the proportions of a type that came down from the Yongle reign of the Ming dynasty. A crossed vajra at the crown, three heads carved one by one down the handle, the blade issuing from a makara's jaws with serpents on all three faces. It weighs 20 g and measures 65 mm. Like the vajras, it comes in pure silver or 24K fire-gilded; the process is described in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
We have never made a drilbu. Our one bell, the Forest Lodge Bell, comes from the pole-and-hide lodge of the far north and says so plainly on its page.
Frequently asked questions
Which hand holds the vajra and which holds the bell?
The vajra in the right, the bell in the left. Right is method, left is wisdom, and at certain points in a ritual the wrists cross at the heart.
What do the vajra and bell symbolize together?
Method and wisdom joined: compassion that acts and insight that sees clearly. The Rubin Museum describes the pair as the unity of these two aspects of the enlightened mind, which is why they are treated as one object.
What is the difference between a phurba and a vajra?
A vajra is symmetrical, pronged at both ends, with no blade, and it is held upright. A phurba has a three-sided blade ending in one point and is held or set point down. Many phurbas use a vajra as their handle, which is why they get confused.
What is the face on a Tibetan bell?
Generally Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom in the form of a goddess. It sits on the handle, below the half vajra and above the cup.
Is a ghanta the same as a drilbu?
Yes. Ghanta is the Sanskrit word and drilbu the Tibetan one. In Hindu worship ghanta also names the hand bell rung during puja.
What is a double vajra?
Two vajras crossed at right angles, the vishvavajra. It stands for ground that cannot be moved, which is why it is engraved under statues and drawn as the floor of a mandala.
When Karma Phuntsho wrote about them, the bell from Senge Dzong was still with the family it had been handed down to, and the dorje was in Trashigang Dzong in eastern Bhutan. The phurba was gone. Ring that bell today and the note will do what bell notes do. It will start to fade before you have quite finished hearing it.
Garuda Vajra Pendant · Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant · Phurba Pendant · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry · Care · Consecration
More from the Journal: The Phurba · Vajra Meaning · Vajrakilaya