Two vajras laid through each other at a right angle: the ground under the world, the seal under a statue, and the emblem of a buddha whose whole family is named for action.
The vishvavajra is the crossed or double vajra: two complete vajras pushed through one another at right angles, so that four heads leave a single hub and point to the four directions. The double vajra meaning, in the Tibetan reading, is stability that holds from every side. It is the emblem of Amoghasiddhi, the green buddha of the north, and of the karma family. In cosmology a vast one lies under the universe. In practice you find it at the foundation of a mandala, under the base of consecrated statues, on the brocade hung below a teacher's throne, and at the center of Bhutan's national emblem. If you want to start with the single form first, what a vajra is and how it is built is covered in our pillar piece.
This one stays with the cross.
Vishvavajra: the double vajra meaning, read as a shape
A single vajra is an axis. Two heads, one at each end, and a waist between them. Whatever it means, it means it in a line.
Cross it and the line becomes a plane. The Rigpa Shedra wiki, following Robert Beer's Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols, describes four vajra heads, each one rising from its own lotus, extending from a central hub toward the four cardinal directions, and says the form stands for "the principle of absolute stability." Encyclopedia entries tend to repeat that phrase. It is worth slowing down on, because the stability it means is the stability of a floor, not of a wall. Nothing is being kept out. Something is being held up.
Look at a real one from above and you can see why. There is no front. Turn it a quarter turn and it is the same object. A thing that can sit in any orientation and stay itself is about the simplest picture of steadiness a carver could make.
Its names: vishvavajra, dorje gyadram, natsok dorje
The Sanskrit is viśvavajra, often written vishvavajra or visvavajra. Wisdom Library's entry, citing a study of the Cakrasamvara meditation drawn from Abhayakaragupta's Nishpannayogavali, translates it as "world vajra", and lists it among the ornaments of Cakrasamvara's crown, where it stands for the mandala of the world system and for actions that serve all beings.
Tibetan has two common names. The first, dorje gyadram (Wylie rdo rje rgya gram), simply says what you see. The Rangjung Yeshe dictionary glosses rgya gram as a cross, a crossed figure, a crossed-vajra design. It is the term behind the Unicode character for the symbol: U+0FC7, TIBETAN SYMBOL RDO RJE RGYA GRAM, so the crossed vajra can be typed like a letter.
The second, natsok dorje (sna tshogs rdo rje), is a translation of the Sanskrit rather than a description. The same dictionary gives sna tshogs as the Tibetan for viśva: all kinds, every variety, many-colored. So the Tibetan scholars who rendered the word chose "the vajra of all kinds". That second sense, many-colored, turns out to be literal on painted versions, as you will see below.
In English you will meet "double vajra", "crossed vajra", "crossed dorje" and "vajra cross" for the same object. "Double" is slightly misleading, since nothing is doubled end to end. It is two vajras, crossed.
How it differs from a single vajra
The obvious difference is the count. A single five-pronged vajra has two heads. A vishvavajra built from five-pronged vajras has four, and so twenty prongs in all. Himalayan Art Resources notes exactly this: vishvavajras with twenty prongs represent activity. The Japanese version, which comes up below, has three prongs to an arm, which gives twelve.
The less obvious difference is in what each one does. The single vajra is held. It goes in the right hand with a bell in the left, it is lifted and set down and moved through gestures. The crossed vajra keeps turning up as something placed instead: drawn, engraved, embroidered, laid flat under something else. The Rangjung Yeshe glossary, quoting the glossary to Tibetan Elemental Divination Paintings, calls it the hand implement of Amoghasiddhi and other deities, and in a general sense the sign of buddha activity. When a deity holds one, it is a statement about that deity. When it is put underneath something, it is a statement about the ground.
The hub matters too. On a single vajra the central sphere sits between two lotuses. On the crossed form the hub has four lotuses around it, one for each arm, and every head stands on a lotus of its own. Nothing in the composition touches bare ground.
Amoghasiddhi and the karma family
Tibetan art arranges the five buddhas of the five families around a center, one to each direction, each with a color, a gesture and an emblem. Amoghasiddhi holds the north. He is green. His family is the karma family, and karma here has its plain meaning: action. His wisdom is the all-accomplishing one, the wisdom that finishes what it starts. In the tables of correspondences he is matched to the element of wind and to envy as the poison his wisdom transforms. His consort is Tara. The crossed vajra is his family's emblem.
The Metropolitan Museum has one of the early Tibetan paintings of him, Buddha Amoghasiddhi with Eight Bodhisattvas, accession 1991.74, central Tibet, about 1200–50, distemper on cloth, 68.9 by 54 centimeters. The catalog identifies him by his green body and by the right hand raised in abhaya mudra, the gesture of protection or fearlessness. Five Taras appear below him, probably his consorts. The style looks back to the Pala painting of eastern India, and the bodhisattvas' pointed crowns link the work to the wall paintings at Drathang monastery.
The Sakya master Dragpa Gyaltsen, in a description Himalayan Art Resources quotes, gives the same buddha a green body, the right hand in the gesture of giving refuge, arising in the north on a throne of garuda, lotus and sun. The garuda is his mount. So a garuda and a crossed vajra already belong to the same buddha in the old texts. Garuda's own story is in Garuda in Tibet.
It can look odd that the emblem of action is a cross that sits so still. The shape explains it. A single vajra is power pointed one way. Four heads point everywhere at once, and the activity of a buddha, in this reading, does not choose a direction and neglect the others.
The ground under the world, and under the mandala
In the cosmology built around Mount Meru, Beer writes, a vast crossed vajra supports and underlies the entire physical universe. The Encyclopedia of Buddhism puts it in older terms: a great double vajra holds up the base of the world system, the lokadhatu.
A mandala is a world in small, so it gets the same foundation. Beer describes the crossed vajra as the immovable support of the mandala palace, the floor the whole architecture stands on. Gates, walls, the deity at the center: all of it is built on four heads and a hub.
The same idea goes onto furniture. A raised teaching throne, Beer notes, is traditionally hung with a brocade showing a crossed vajra at its center, often with four small swastikas in the corners, standing for the unshakable ground of the Buddha's enlightenment. A teacher sits above it. The symbol says what is underneath the teaching.
Under the statue
Turn over a consecrated Tibetan bronze and you will often find a copper plate closing the base. Inside are the consecration materials. On the plate, very often, a double vajra.
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley keeps one of these plates on its own, collected in Tibet by Theos C. Bernard. Its catalog note says the double vajra is always engraved or embossed on the bottom plate of such an image, and that it stabilizes the deity's presence within it. At the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, a gilt copper Mahasiddha with turquoise insets, accession S2016.34, from central or eastern Tibet and dated from the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, stands 48.3 centimeters high. The materials line ends with a detail that makes it more than a sculpture: base sealed with copper plate incised with double vajra, contents inside. The seal is still doing its work.
It is the cosmology at the size of a hand. The universe rests on a crossed vajra. So does the statue.
Bhutan's emblem
The national emblem of Bhutan is a circle containing a double vajra placed above a lotus, with a jewel above and two dragons framing it. Wikipedia's description of the emblem reads the double vajra as the harmony between secular and religious power. The lotus stands for purity, the jewel for sovereign power, and the male and female dragons for the name of the country, which they proclaim in their great voice, the thunder. A single word for thunder runs from the vajra to the dragons.
Named objects you can go and look at
Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, C2005.44. A freestanding double vajra, Tibet, twentieth century, 14.9 by 14.9 centimeters across and 6 centimeters deep. The Rubin lists it as on view at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in the exhibition Gateway to Himalayan Art until January 10, 2027. Six centimeters is the number to notice. Each of the four heads has real depth, so the object is a crossing of two solid vajras and not a flat cross.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 15.95.175. Armlet for an Image with Crossed Vajras, Nepal, seventeenth to nineteenth century, gilt silver set with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, pearls, lapis lazuli, coral, shell, mother of pearl, amber and turquoise, 6.7 by 18.4 centimeters. It was made to be worn by a statue. The catalog reads the crossed vajras at the center as the four cardinal directions, and the diamond set at the crossing as the axis of the universe, the stable point where the Buddha reached enlightenment. Coral kirtimukha faces sit on either side. Of all the objects here, this is the closest relative of a piece of jewelry, and it was made for a god's arm.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.142.302. Seated Male Deity Holding a Double Vajra, eastern Java, Ngandjuk, last quarter of the tenth century, bronze, 11 centimeters high. Small enough to stand in a palm, and a thousand years old, it shows that the crossed vajra was already being held as an attribute far from Tibet.
Seattle Art Museum, 36.20. Crossed vajra (katsuma), Japan, late fourteenth to sixteenth century, brass, 12.38 centimeters square and only 1.27 centimeters thick. Japanese Esoteric Buddhism has its own vishvavajra, and the name is worth knowing.
The Japanese katsuma
Katsuma is the Japanese reading of the Sanskrit karma, the same word that names Amoghasiddhi's family. The JAANUS dictionary of Japanese art terms describes the katsuma as a cross with three prongs on each arm, like two three-pronged sankosho combined. It reads the twelve prongs as twelve aspects of causation related to karma. The katsuma is usually gilt bronze and is set at the four corners of the altar during an Esoteric Buddhist service, so the whole ritual space sits inside four of them. Some images of the Four Heavenly Kings have halos shaped like a katsuma, and a pattern based on it, the katsumamon, appears on ritual utensils and robes. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria holds one more, 1973.236.001, a brass double vajra 12.2 centimeters across, catalogued simply as "sanko, three prongs."
Tibet puts the crossed vajra under things. Japan sets four of them around the altar. Either way it is marking out ground.
How to read the colors on a painted double vajra
When a vishvavajra is painted, it carries the colors of the five families. Beer gives the standard scheme:
- Hub: dark blue.
- East: white.
- South: yellow.
- West: red.
- North: green.
Each color is a buddha. Yellow is Ratnasambhava of the south, red is Amitabha of the west, green is Amoghasiddhi of the north. In Beer's scheme the dark blue hub is Akshobhya at the center, which leaves white Vairocana in the east. That arrangement is not fixed everywhere. The positions of Akshobhya and Vairocana switch depending on the teaching: the Guhyasamaja system puts Akshobhya at the center, and so does the Nyingma Longchen Nyingtik, while other systems keep Vairocana there. On a painting from a Vairocana-centered system, expect blue and white to trade places.
So when you stand in front of a painted crossed vajra, find the green arm first. That is north, Amoghasiddhi, the family the whole emblem belongs to. Then read the others round from it, and look at the hub last to see which buddha the painter put at the center.
That many-colored cross is what the Tibetan natsok, "of all kinds", describes.
The vishvavajra in jewelry
The Met's armlet shows that crossed vajras were worn, if not by people then by the images people made. A cross is read along two axes at once, so any difference between opposite arms shows.
Our Garuda Vishvavajra Pendant is two complete five-pronged vajras laid through one another, so each of the four arms is a full head. It is 50 × 50 × 16 mm (2.0 × 2.0 × 0.63 in) and 39 g (1.4 oz), carved front, back and edge. Every prong is a makara, jaws open and snout curling back, sixteen in all, and each holds a natural garnet set by hand after the carving was finished. At the crossing, where a ritual vishvavajra has its hub, we put a garuda, seated on four lotus thrones. It is a departure from the ritual form, and we say so; Dragpa Gyaltsen's garuda throne makes the bird less of a stranger there than it might look.
The Rubin's double vajra is 14.9 centimeters across. Ours is 5. At that scale the half millimeter matters: one makara half a millimeter off its opposite and the eye catches it at once, and four arms had to agree with each other four times. The bail is carved, scrolled and beaded, not bought in. In the Genesis Fire-Gilded edition, 24K gold is fused into the silver at about 900°C, below gold's melting point of 1064°C, and runs through the garuda's beak and flames, along every lotus petal and around every beaded collar. Then every line is re-cut by hand under a 40× microscope so the gold follows the petals across four arms without filling an undercut or crossing onto a stone. That is about fourteen days at the bench for each piece. The Pure Silver edition keeps all sixteen garnets and leaves out only the gold. How the gilding works is on Traditional Fire-Gilding.
The crossed vajra turns up on three more of our pieces. It is the fire-gilded center of the shell on the Nine-Palace Zodiac Amulet, whose tortoise is explained in The Tortoise That Carries the Sky. It opens the face of the Dharma Conch Pendant, with a single turquoise at the crossing and the eight auspicious symbols around it. And it is the crown of the Phurba Pendant, as it is on many ritual phurbas.
We make no claim that wearing any of them steadies or protects anyone. They are silver, garnet and gold in a shape the tradition uses for the ground, carved as carefully as we can manage.
For the single dorje, its prongs and its partner the bell, start with Vajra Meaning: The Tibetan Dorje. For the difference between five and nine prongs, see Five-Pronged vs Nine-Pronged Vajra. The vajra, bell and phurba side by side are in Tibetan Ritual Implements Explained.
Double vajra questions
What is a vishvavajra?
Two vajras crossed at right angles, so that four vajra heads leave one hub toward the four directions. The Sanskrit viśvavajra is translated "world vajra". It is also called the double vajra or crossed vajra, and in Tibetan dorje gyadram or natsok dorje. For the single form it is built from, see vajra meaning.
What does the double vajra mean?
Absolute stability: ground that holds from every direction. In Buddhist cosmology a vast double vajra supports the universe, and in a mandala it is the floor of the palace. It is also the emblem of Amoghasiddhi and the karma family, and so stands for enlightened activity.
Is a crossed vajra the same as a double vajra?
Yes. Crossed vajra, double vajra, crossed dorje, vajra cross, vishvavajra and visvavajra all name the same form.
Which buddha does the double vajra belong to?
Amoghasiddhi, the green buddha of the north, lord of the karma (action) family, whose wisdom is all-accomplishing. His right hand is raised in the gesture of fearlessness, and in Dragpa Gyaltsen's description he sits on a garuda throne.
Why is there a double vajra on the bottom of Buddhist statues?
Consecrated statues are filled and sealed with a copper base plate, and that plate usually carries a double vajra. The Hearst Museum's catalog says it stabilizes the deity's presence in the image, the same role the crossed vajra plays under the universe.
How many prongs does a double vajra have?
It depends on the heads. Four five-pronged heads make twenty prongs, which Himalayan Art Resources associates with activity. The Japanese katsuma has three prongs on each arm, twelve in all.
What do the colors on a crossed vajra mean?
They are the five buddha families. In the common scheme the hub is dark blue, east white, south yellow, west red and north green. Blue and white can swap depending on which buddha sits at the center of the system.
Why is there a double vajra on the emblem of Bhutan?
Bhutan's national emblem sets a double vajra above a lotus, read as the harmony between secular and religious power. The jewel above it stands for sovereignty and the two dragons for the country's name.
A plate with four heads
On the base of the Smithsonian's Mahasiddha there is a copper plate with a crossed vajra incised into it, and behind the plate, the museum records, the contents are still inside. Someone cut four heads into that copper so the plate would close and stay closed. It has. The statue has been moved across the world since then, and the plate has kept doing the one thing it was cut for.