A stout yellow king with a citron in one hand and a mongoose in the other, the jewels falling from its mouth, and why painters so often set him on black.
Yellow Jambhala is the most common form of Jambhala, the wealth deity of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetans call him Dzambhala Serpo, dzam bha la ser po; the Sanskrit is Pīta Jambhala, yellow Jambhala. He is drawn yellow and heavy-bodied, crowned and jeweled like a king, holding a citron fruit in his right hand and, in his left, a mongoose that spits out jewels. Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources calls Jambhala the wealth deity most commonly depicted in Himalayan art. The tradition is just as clear about what the wealth is for, and that comes at the end.
Jambhala meaning: who he is
Jambhala is a meditational deity, but a minor one. Watt, writing for Tricycle, places wealth deities inside larger tantric systems such as Chakrasamvara, Hevajra and Kalachakra. He has many forms. HAR counts at least ten in the Sarma, or "new translation", schools alone, and more in the Nyingma revealed-treasure literature.
His look is old. Watt describes the classic Jambhala as yellow, with one face and two arms, a broad face with a mustache and a slight beard, round, almost glaring eyes, a large, slightly corpulent torso and short limbs. The model is the Indian yaksha, the nature spirit of wealth and earth, and Himalayan painters use the same model for kings. HAR's name for it is the "King Appearance". The full belly and the crown are the dress of a lord of plenty.
Jambhala, Vaishravana and Kubera
The three names get mixed together constantly. The Metropolitan Museum's small copper-alloy Jambhala, God of Riches, from Sri Lanka in the ninth or tenth century, accession 2010.475.4, stands just 9.3 centimeters high. The Met's label calls Jambhala the Buddhist counterpart of Kubera, a yaksha whom early Hinduism absorbed as protector of jewels and treasure, and describes Jambhala as chief of the yakshas. Britannica lists both Vaishravana and Jambhala among Kubera's other names.
Inside Tibetan tantric literature the lines are sharper. HAR's page on the confusion explains that in Mahayana sutras Kubera and Vaishravana are used as synonyms, and Vaishravana is the Guardian King of the North, one of the Four Guardian Kings. Jambhala, HAR says, comes from very different texts and origin stories than Vaishravana. The reason the three blur is visual: Vaishravana, Jambhala and others share the King Appearance, and they share the mongoose in the left hand.
Teaching traditions often join them anyway: the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore describes Yellow Dzambhala as an emanation of Vaishravana. In devotion they are often treated as one family; in the texts they have separate histories.
Yellow Jambhala iconography
HAR's standard description comes from the Sakya compiler Ngorchen Konchog Lhundrub (1497–1557), in his One Hundred Methods of Accomplishment. Read with Watt's notes, it gives a precise figure:
- Body. Yellow, one face, two hands. Stout, crowned, adorned with jewel ornaments and a garland of blue utpala flowers.
- Right hand. A bījapūraka, the citron fruit, held out. Some temples teach it as a wish-fulfilling fruit; the Singapore temple describes the hand as being in the giving gesture as it holds it.
- Left hand. A mongoose, "with jewels showering down", in Konchog Lhundrub's words.
- Feet. In that text, both feet press down on a conch and a lotus treasure. Many paintings show instead the right leg extended and the left folded; the Singapore temple calls it the posture of royal ease, with the right foot resting on a conch.
- Seat. A lotus and moon disc, in the Singapore temple's description, often with a large white conch below.
HAR notes that one group of paintings seems to share a single model, recognizable by an extremely large white conch shell on top of a lotus seat. The Rubin's clay Yellow Jambhala from seventeenth-century Tibet, accession C2006.64.1, sits on exactly that kind of conch. It is about 64 centimeters tall, built hollow from unfired clay mixed with paper and water, painted, and filled with consecrated materials. The Rubin's note adds that this conch-seated form is found mainly in Kham, in southeastern Tibet, and calls the conch a symbol of plenty.
Why does Jambhala hold a mongoose?
The Rubin's label on that clay figure answers in three steps. Snakes are a symbol of avarice. The mongoose kills snakes, so it stands for prosperity. And the image of the mongoose disgorging jewels, the label says, is a reminder that we receive by giving.
The serpents are not abstract. In Tibet the snake-beings are the nagas, keepers of water and buried treasure, which we wrote about in The Naga. Konchog Lhundrub's Black Jambhala is "adorned with the eight great nagas" and holds "a mongoose expelling various jewels"; the Red Jambhala described by Terdag Lingpa and Minling Lochen, quoted on the same HAR page, is "adorned with the eight great snakes" and holds a jewel-spewing mongoose in each of two hands. The treasure the nagas hold, the mongoose gives out.
HAR calls the mongoose the most identifiable shared mark of the Twelve Yaksha Generals, and it is shared with Vaishravana as well. On a well-drawn thangka, look at its mouth. The jewels come out of it in a string or a spray, and the animal is usually no bigger than the king's hand.
The Five Jambhalas
HAR gives five principal colors: yellow, black, white, green and red. Yellow and black are the most common, followed by red and white. Each has its own line:
- Yellow. Found in several tantras and practiced throughout Tantric Buddhism.
- Black. In many early sources, and popularized in Tibet by Bari Lotsawa (born 1040) and the Kashmiri teacher Shakyashri Bhadra. Wrathful, dwarfish and pot-bellied, his right leg extended and pressing on a yellow lord of wealth.
- White. Probably a pure-vision experience of Atisha, popular in the Kadam and Gelug schools. In Atisha's tradition he is surrounded by four dakinis, which is why HAR says this form is itself known as a five-deity Jambhala.
- Red. With consort, from the Chakrasamvara cycle, handed down in the Sakya tradition.
- Green. With consort, from the Kalachakra Tantra, with a retinue of eight goddesses.
Paintings of all five together are common today, usually with Yellow Jambhala at the center. HAR is candid: fundamentally and historically, it says, the five do not go together, and modern paintings of the set appear to follow a text by Jamgön Kongtrul (1813–1899). The earliest such painting HAR knows of, now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (HAR 88908), is dated 1900 to 1959. It puts a blue Jambhala with consort at the center, with yellow, red, black and white in the four corners.
Black and gold thangka: why the black ground suits him
A black-ground thangka, nagthang, is drawn in gold line on black. Watt traces its roots to tantric texts of the ninth to twelfth centuries, including versions of the Mahakala Tantra that tell the practitioner to paint on charnel-ground cloth with funerary ash; that is where the black came from. The form grew popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was kept for wrathful deities at first. Watt also notes that contemporary painters now use black grounds for peaceful deities too. How the ground types differ is set out in What Is a Thangka?
Jambhala sits well there. The texts dress him in gold and jewels, and on black nothing competes with the line; a citron, a mongoose and a string of jewels are small closed shapes, and gold line holds the edge of a small shape better than color does. In Tibet black and gold is felt to carry dignity and mystery, which suits a king.
Jambhala in the large Amitabha thangka
HAR notes that Jambhala usually appears as a minor figure low in other paintings, above or beside the protectors (see Amitabha Buddha). Our Amitabha with Shakyamuni, Tsongkhapa & Medicine Buddha follows that classic layout: Amitabha with Shakyamuni, Tsongkhapa and the Medicine Buddha above, a nagini on either side below, and Yellow Jambhala at the center below, on a black ground with gold and silver line.
The Yellow Jambhala mantra
The mantra commonly given for Yellow Jambhala is om jambhala jalendraye svaha. The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore gives it as Om Jambhala Jalendraya Svaha, with a second form, Om Dzambhala Dzalim Dzaye Svaha. Wording varies by lineage.
What the wealth is for: generosity
Watt is direct about this. Wealth deities, he writes, have the function of helping religious practitioners acquire the worldly goods they need, and the practices have long been used for feeding the poor, giving medicine to the sick, funding pilgrimages and building stupas and religious centers. "Wealth practices are intended for religious and spiritual goals," he says, "not for personal gain."
The family Jambhala belongs to says the same. FPMT describes Dzambhala as an emanation of Ratnasambhava, the yellow buddha of the jewel family, "whose essence is generosity". The Singapore temple teaches that Yellow Dzambhala relieves the poverty of beings, and in the same breath that material wealth serves only this life, while the realizations of the Dharma are the true wealth.
Those are the tradition's teachings, held by its practitioners. A thangka of Jambhala is an image of him made with care; we do not claim it brings money, luck or anything else to the person who hangs it.
Our Yellow Jambhala black and gold thangka
Our Yellow Jambhala Black and Gold Thangka shows him in the standard form. He is yellow, stout and crowned. His right hand holds out a citron, his left holds the mongoose. His right leg is extended and his left folded. He wears jeweled necklaces set with crystals, inside a gold-line halo with red and blue crystals, above clouds and mountains. The ground is black, worked in gold and silver line, and it is shown in the Ink & Gold brocade.
The image is our own drawing, kept to traditional iconometric proportions and printed on heavy card; it is not hand-painted and not mineral pigment. Elderly lay Buddhists who practice at a temple finish it by hand there, setting the glass crystals one by one and tracing the outlines in gold glitter, about two days for each piece. 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; the brocade also comes in Night Sky, Crimson Cloud and Warm Sun. Part of every order goes to that temple, so every thangka is also an offering.
The rest are in the thangka collection, and where and how to put one up is in How to Hang a Thangka.
Jambhala questions
Who is Jambhala?
A wealth deity of Tantric Buddhism, Dzambhala in Tibetan, drawn as a stout, crowned king. Yellow Jambhala is his most common form.
Why does Jambhala hold a mongoose?
The mongoose kills snakes, which stand for avarice, and in his hand it spits out jewels. The Rubin reads it as a reminder that we receive by giving.
Is Jambhala the same as Kubera or Vaishravana?
Not in the texts. HAR explains that Jambhala has different textual origins from Vaishravana, and that Kubera and Vaishravana are synonyms in the sutras. They look alike because they share the king's dress and the mongoose, and some teachings call Jambhala an emanation of Vaishravana.
What are the five Jambhalas?
Yellow, black, white, green and red. Each comes from a different lineage; HAR notes that grouping all five together is modern.
What is the Yellow Jambhala mantra?
Om jambhala jalendraye svaha, with small variations between lineages.
Why are some thangkas black and gold?
The black-ground thangka, nagthang, began with wrathful deities drawn in gold line on black. Painters now use it for peaceful deities too, and in Tibet black and gold is felt to carry dignity and mystery.
The jewels in the mouth
Konchog Lhundrub's text gives the mongoose a handful of words: jewels showering down. The painters took those words and drew a small animal with its mouth open and something falling out of it. Not into the king's lap. Out, and down, toward whoever stands below.
May what comes to your hands keep moving through them.
Yellow Jambhala Black and Gold Thangka · Amitabha with Shakyamuni, Tsongkhapa & Medicine Buddha · Thangka collection
More from the Journal: What Is a Thangka? · The Naga · Amitabha Buddha · How to Hang a Thangka