A wrathful deity with wings, a peg held at his heart, and a common mix-up about where his body ends and the dagger begins.
Vajrakilaya is the deity of the phurba, the three-sided ritual peg of Tibet. Tibetans call him Dorje Phurba. He is a wrathful yidam, a meditational deity, and his practice goes back in tradition to Padmasambhava, who is said to have accomplished it in a cave at the southern edge of the Kathmandu Valley. The Nyingma school holds him at its center. The Sakya school received him through a single family, the Khon, and has kept him there for nearly a thousand years.
We carve his face at the bottom of the handle on our phurba pendant, where the silver turns from handle into blade, and like every line on that piece it is finished under a 40× microscope. At that magnification you stop seeing a pendant and start seeing fangs, an eyebrow, the corner of a mouth. It makes you want to know, properly, whose face it is.
Vajrakilaya meaning: a name built from two objects
Vajra is the diamond-thunderbolt, the thing that breaks everything and cannot itself be broken. There is a whole article on it in Vajra Meaning. Kila is humbler. It means a stake. A tent peg, a boundary marker, the post you drive into the ground at the corner of a ritual space so that the space holds.
Put them together and you get Vajrakilaya, the Diamond Peg; Dorje Phurba is the word-for-word Tibetan. He is also Vajrakumara, "Vajra Youth." One Nyingma verse quoted by Himalayan Art Resources (HAR) beside a Rubin Museum painting addresses him as the son of all the gathered wrathful buddhas, and closes by bowing to the form of Vajra Kumara.
The choice of a peg makes sense once you think about what pegs do. They don't cut. They fix. The Rigpa wiki describes Vajrakilaya as the embodiment of the enlightened activity of all buddhas, and in the Nyingma group of eight great herukas, the Kagyé, he is the one given the job of activity. Activity is the part that actually walks over and drives the stake in.
Reading a Vajrakilaya thangka
The clearest painting we know of to learn from belongs to the Rubin Museum of Art, accession number P1996.20.25. It is a nineteenth-century Tibetan nag thang, a "black scroll," a little over 43 by 34 centimeters: ground mineral pigment on cotton, the whole field painted black and the figures drawn in gold line with very little color. HAR notes that this style is kept for wrathful deities and protectors. You can see why. On black, the gold lines read like fire seen at night. Nearly everything in Jeff Watt's catalog entry for it you can find with your own eyes.
Three faces, and the colors of each
The body is dark blue. In the standard description written by the Sakya master Ngawang Kunga Lodro (1729–1783), the three faces are blue at the center, white on the right and red on the left. Each face has three eyes, a gaping mouth and a curled red tongue. Yellow hair flares straight up. On the central head, above a crown of five dry skulls, sits a small gold half-vajra.
Six hands
The first pair hold the kila at the heart, point down, and in the Sakya text they "roll" it, as if turning it between the palms. The right hands hold a five-pronged and a nine-pronged vajra. The left hands hold a trident with streamers and a mass of flame, which on the Rubin painting is wound around one index finger like thread.
Wings
Two large feathered wings open behind him. The Rubin's own glossary leads with them: Vajrakila is the blue wrathful deity with wings. In a room full of wrathful paintings, the wings and the peg at the heart are how you find him.
Skins, serpents and four legs
An elephant hide and a human skin hang across his back, a tiger skin is wrapped at the waist, and he wears a necklace of fifty heads. Serpents coil at his ears and wrists: nagas, the water spirits who also twist down so many phurba blades (more in The Naga). He stands on four legs on the splayed bodies of Maheshvara and Uma. In the Buddhist reading those trampled figures are the obstacles to waking up, given bodies so they can be painted.
The consort
His consort is Diptacakra, "Flaming Wheel" (some texts give Triptacakra). Lotsawa House gives her Tibetan name as 'khor lo rgyas 'debs ma, usually written Khorlo Gyedebma. On the Rubin painting she has one face and two hands, a skull cup in her left hand, a leopard-skin skirt, and her raised left leg wraps around him. Lotsawa House reads their union, yab-yum, as the inseparability of wisdom and emptiness. Neither one is the main figure. The pair is.
The deity who is the dagger, and a careful correction
You will often read, including in our own earlier writing, that Vajrakilaya's lower body is the phurba blade. The truth is more careful than that, and more interesting.
In his main form, the one on the Rubin scroll, he has four legs and holds the kila in his hands. The Rubin's glossary says he is sometimes shown with a three-bladed dagger for a lower body. And HAR published a short note in 2011 called "Vajrakila: Confusions in Identification," pointing out that many kila-bodied figures in paintings are not Vajrakila at all. Some are members of his retinue. A fifteenth-century Vajrakila mandala at Tibet House in New York shows exactly this: the central deity on four legs, and smaller wrathful figures around him whose bodies taper into pegs. Others are separate deities altogether, such as Guru Dragpur, Simhamukha, or the Bon deity Purba Drugse Chempa.
The place where deity and dagger really become one is the object. HAR describes the Vajrakila type of phurba as one with three faces at the top under a half-vajra crown. The Metropolitan Museum puts it more directly in its catalog for an ebony phurba, accession 2019.122a, b, dated to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century: the dagger embodies the deity. That piece stands 42.5 centimeters tall on its own small stand, carved from ebony and painted. Six hundred years on, it is still standing upright.
The Rubin holds another, catalogued as earlier than the fifteenth century, made of horn and wood and about 31 centimeters long, with the three faces of Vajrakila at the top. Horn in one, ebony in the other, and the idea held steady across both. The three faces on the handle are his faces. The blade below them is where he goes into the ground.
If you want to read a phurba section by section, start with Parts of a Phurba: Makara, Knots, Three Faces and the Blade. For how it sits on a shrine beside the vajra and bell, see Tibetan Ritual Implements Explained: Vajra, Phurba and the Bell.
Padmasambhava at Yangleshö and the Asura Cave
The story that gave Vajrakilaya his place in Tibet happens in Nepal. South of Kathmandu, near the town of Pharping, there are two caves. Yangleshö is the lower one. The Asura Cave sits a little higher, above the town.
This is the account as the tradition tells it, from Lotsawa House, the Nekhor guide to Padmasambhava's sites and the Rangjung Yeshe wiki. It is sacred history. Nobody can date it.
Padmasambhava came to these caves with his consort, a Nepali woman named Belmo Shakyadevi, and began a retreat on the deity Yangdak Heruka. The retreat was disturbed. The sources call the trouble demonic forces, and it was bad enough that he sent for help. Two Newar disciples went to Nalanda, in India, to ask the scholar Prabhahasti for the teachings that could deal with it. They came back carrying a Vajrakilaya tantra known as the Vidyottama. When the texts reached the cave, the disturbance stopped.
Whatever you make of the demons, the shape of that story is very real. A retreat stalls in the hills, two people make the long trip down to one of the great monastic universities of India and back, and a practice arrives in the mountains because somebody carried it there.
After that, the tradition says, Vajrakilaya became Padmasambhava's own deity. He joined the two practices: Yangdak for realization, Vajrakilaya to clear what stood in its way. At the Asura Cave he is said to have reached the level of a Mahamudra vidyadhara. The Nekhor guide records a local belief that when he accomplished Vajrakilaya, kilas rained from the sky, and that some can still be seen there. Later, with the Indian master Vimalamitra and the Nepali Shilamanju, he is said to have put the kila teachings in order at Yangleshö. (The longer story of the peg itself is in From Stake to Sacred Dagger: A Short History of the Kila.)
Two lineages: Nyingma and the Sakya Khon family
Nyingma
HAR calls Vajrakilaya the most popular meditational deity of the Nyingma school, with dozens of lineages. Some arrived by kama, unbroken teacher-to-student transmission. Many more are terma, treasure teachings the tradition says were hidden by Padmasambhava's circle and found centuries later, by revealers from Guru Chöwang and Jigme Lingpa down to Dudjom Rinpoche. When Samye, Tibet's first monastery, was finished, the first teaching Padmasambhava is said to have given his twenty-five closest disciples was the Vajrakilaya tantra.
Sakya and the Khon family
The Sakya line is narrower, because it runs through blood. According to Sakya accounts, Khon Lu'i Wangpo Sungwa, known in Sanskrit as Nagendrarakshita, was one of Padmasambhava's early Tibetan students. He and his younger brother Dorje Rinchen received Vajrakilaya from Padmasambhava directly. The Rangjung Yeshe wiki calls this line the Khon Phur. From then on, a 1991 Snow Lion article says, it passed father to son. When the Khon family founded the Sakya school in the eleventh century, the deity came with them, and today Sakya counts Vajrakilaya as one of its two principal deities, alongside Hevajra.
One family story is worth telling because it is so human. Khon Konchog Gyalpo (1034–1102), the man who founded Sakya Monastery, watched Vajrakilaya rites being staged as a public show. Afterward he buried the family's ritual implements and texts. Then, the Sakya account says, his personal deity came to him in a dream and told him to take the practice up again, and he went back and dug them out of the ground.
In the thirteenth century Sakya Pandita, the school's great scholar, is credited with translating a Sanskrit section of the root tantra into Tibetan. The Snow Lion article says that translation is included in the Kangyur, the Tibetan canon.
The same article gives the most vivid detail. At Sakya in Tibet, Vajrakilaya was performed every year in the seventh lunar month. About a hundred dancers took part. The first dances blessed the ground and sky and built the mandala; a sand mandala was made; days of chanting followed; the masked wrathful dances closed the month. In exile the ritual moved to the Sakya Centre in Rajpur, India, where the article says it continued each year with a sand mandala and eleven days of chanting.
What practitioners mean by "obstacles"
Vajrakilaya is called the deity who removes obstacles. The Rigpa wiki calls his the most powerful practice for it. A prayer to Padmasambhava quoted by the Nekhor guide says that by means of Vajrakilaya he liberates all obstacles and obstructers.
In the tradition the obstacles that matter first are obstacles to awakening. The Met's catalog names the three poisons that the dagger is meant to consume: ignorance, greed and delusion, the old Buddhist roots of suffering. Read that way, three faces on the deity and three faces on the blade say the same thing twice.
What is pinned is not always destroyed. Lotsawa House records that Padmasambhava bound the twelve tenma goddesses to guard the mandala. A peg holds a thing where it is, which is a different act from cutting it.
We describe all of this as the belief of the people who practice it. A pendant, ours included, does not remove anything from anyone's life, and we would never say it does.
The Vajrakilaya mantra
Vajrakilaya has a short mantra from the root tantra. It is widely printed, and Buddhist communities often recite it together. Lotsawa House, which publishes the tantra section it comes from, marks that text as restricted to people who have received empowerment and instruction, so we have left the words out of this page. The practice belongs to teachers and their students. If it calls to you, a qualified teacher is the person to ask.
Vajrakilaya on our phurba
Three heads are stacked down the handle of our Phurba Pendant, each carved on its own with its own expression. Garuda at the top. The Lord of the Charnel Ground in the middle. Vajrakilaya at the base.
We put him at the base, at the throat of the thing, where the handle stops and the blade starts, so that the point below is the point of him. Under his face the blade comes out of a makara's open jaws, and nagas twist down all three faces in low relief. Between every section runs a band of raised beads, each grain cut separately, and the back is carved as deeply as the front. The proportions follow a phurba type of the Ming dynasty's Yongle period.
On the 24K fire-gilded edition the gold goes into the flames and faces down the handle and along the serpents on the blade, and then every line is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so that the gold stops exactly at the edge of each form instead of flooding the hollows. The process is explained in Traditional Fire-Gilding. The whole pendant is 65 millimeters long and weighs 20 grams. On a chain that is about the weight of four nickels, cold for the first minute and then the same temperature as you.
If you are wondering whether to wear one, Phurba Pendant: How to Choose One and Wear It Respectfully and Can Non-Buddhists Wear Buddhist Jewelry? try to answer that honestly. The object itself is covered in The Phurba: Why Tibet's Ritual Dagger Has Three Faces and No Edge.
Frequently asked questions
What does Vajrakilaya mean?
Roughly "Diamond Peg." Vajra is the indestructible diamond-thunderbolt and kila is a stake. Dorje Phurba is the same name in Tibetan.
Who is Vajrakilaya's consort?
Diptacakra, "Flaming Wheel," Khorlo Gyedebma in Tibetan. She is painted with one face and two arms, holding a skull cup, in union with him.
Does Vajrakilaya have a dagger for a lower body?
Usually not. His main painted form has four legs and holds the peg in two hands. Kila-bodied figures in his mandala are often his retinue, and the identity of deity and dagger is clearest in the ritual phurba, whose three faces are his.
Where did Padmasambhava practice Vajrakilaya?
Tradition places it at Yangleshö and the Asura Cave near Pharping, at the southern edge of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.
Why is Vajrakilaya wrathful?
In Tibetan iconography wrath is compassion that has stopped waiting. The fangs and flames are turned toward the three poisons and whatever blocks awakening, never toward the person standing in front of the painting.
In the Rubin Museum's collection there is a painting on black cotton where a painter, sometime in the nineteenth century, wound a line of gold flame around one finger of a six-armed god and moved on to the next hand. Nobody was going to check. It is there anyway. That kind of care, spent where no one will look, is the part of this tradition we most hope to deserve.
Phurba Pendant · Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant
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