A weapon that became a diamond, a diamond that became a mind, and why the prongs always curve back in.
In short: vajra, dorje in Tibetan, means both thunderbolt and diamond. In Tibetan Buddhism it stands for a mind that cannot be broken; paired with the bell, it stands for compassion in action. Its five prongs are the five wisdoms.
Long before it was Buddhist, the vajra was a thunderbolt. In the oldest hymns of India it belongs to Indra, the storm god, who hurls it to split the serpent that has swallowed the rivers and let the water run again. It was the one weapon that could not be broken.
The word kept both of its meanings. In Sanskrit vajra is thunderbolt and it is diamond: the thing that cuts through anything, and the thing that nothing can cut. When Buddhism took the object over, it kept the pair and moved it inward. The vajra stopped being something you throw at an enemy and became a description of a mind that meets whatever comes without shattering, and without first having to turn hard.
In Tibetan it is the dorje, usually translated as "lord of stones". The hill town of Darjeeling is said to take its name from it: Dorje-ling, the place of the thunderbolt. And the whole Tibetan tradition of tantric Buddhism is named after it. Vajrayana means the diamond vehicle.
What you are looking at
A classic vajra is symmetrical about its middle. At the centre sits a sphere, often read as the undivided nature of things before it splits into opposites. Out of it grow two lotus flowers, one facing up and one facing down, and out of each lotus rise the prongs.
On a five-pronged vajra, four outer prongs curve in towards a straight central one and meet it near the tip. They usually spring from the open jaws of a makara, the water creature with an elephant's trunk and a crocodile's mouth that turns up all over Himalayan art. The prongs do not splay outwards. They close. Whatever the vajra stands for, it is gathered, not scattered.
Why five
The five prongs at each end are read as the five wisdoms, which in Vajrayana correspond to five buddha families. Put simply: the wisdom that reflects things exactly as they are, like a mirror; the wisdom that sees them as equal and stops ranking them; the wisdom that still tells them apart; the wisdom that carries an action through to its end; and the open space in which the other four operate.
The prongs are not decoration arranged around that idea. They are the idea, drawn in metal. Four gather around a centre, the way the four directions gather around the place you stand.
Three-pronged and nine-pronged vajras exist too, and ritual vajras are made in many sizes. The five-pronged form is the one most people picture, and the one used most widely in Tibetan practice.
Vajra and bell
In ritual the vajra almost never appears alone. It is held in the right hand, and in the left is a bell, the ghanta, whose handle is itself half a vajra. The vajra stands for method, which in this tradition means compassion put into action. The bell stands for wisdom, the understanding that sees through things. Neither is enough without the other. Compassion without insight goes wrong; insight without compassion goes cold.
A practitioner crosses the two at the heart during certain parts of a ritual. Sometimes the vajra appears in paintings with no bell in sight, but the pairing is always implied.
The crossed vajra
Lay one vajra through another at right angles and you have the vishvavajra, the double or crossed vajra. It points in four directions at once, with nothing left open behind it.
In Buddhist cosmology the crossed vajra lies beneath Mount Meru, the axis of the world, as the foundation that nothing can shift. It is often carved on the underside of statues and placed at the base of stupas for the same reason: it marks ground that holds. It belongs to Amoghasiddhi, the buddha of all-accomplishing wisdom, whose quality is fearlessness and whose work is action finished properly.
The vajras we make
We make three, and each one puts a garuda at the centre where the sphere would normally be. The garuda is the bird that eats serpents and is not harmed by their poison; there is more about him in Garuda in Tibet. Every centre sits on lotus thrones, because in this tradition nothing sacred is set down on bare ground.
The Garuda Vajra Pendant is the ritual form built at a wearable size: 60 mm (2.4 in) tip to tip and 33 g (1.2 oz), with ten makara-headed prongs, a garuda head between two lotus thrones and eight natural garnets set at the roots of the outer prongs. We took the proportions from the implement rather than from a jeweller's idea of it.
The Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant is the crossed form: four complete five-pronged heads meeting at right angles, sixteen makara heads each set with a natural garnet, and the garuda at the crossing on four lotus thrones. It measures 50 × 50 × 16 mm (2.0 × 2.0 × 0.63 in) and weighs 39 g (1.4 oz), and it is carved on the back and edges as well as the face. Turn it ninety degrees and it matches itself.
The Garuda Five-Pronged Vajra Pendant is worn lying horizontally across the chest, 50 mm (2.0 in) long and 22 g (0.8 oz), with the garuda's face in 24K fire-gilded gold and eight natural garnets.
The upright and crossed vajras come in pure silver or with 24K fire-gilding, where the gold is fused into the silver by fire and every line is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope. How that works is explained in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
Vajra questions, briefly
Is a vajra the same as a dorje? Yes. Vajra is the Sanskrit word and dorje the Tibetan; both name the same ritual object.
Which hand holds the vajra? The right. The bell is held in the left.
What is a double vajra? The vishvavajra: two vajras crossed at right angles, said to lie beneath Mount Meru as ground that nothing can shift.
Can I wear one if I'm not Buddhist? Many people do. What matters is wearing it with some understanding; we wrote a short guide: Can You Wear Buddhist Jewelry If You're Not Buddhist?
A note on what we claim
We write about the vajra as the history and practice it is. We do not claim that wearing one will protect you or change anything by itself. What it can do is sit against your chest as a reminder of two things that are easy to lose hold of at the same time: that you can cut through what needs cutting, and that you do not have to break in the process.
May nothing break you, and may you never need to become hard to stay whole.
Garuda Vajra Pendant · Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant · Garuda Five-Pronged Vajra Pendant · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry
More from the Journal: The Phurba · Garuda in Tibet · The Eight Auspicious Symbols