Yamantaka

The hermit was one day short. Forty-nine years, eleven months and twenty-nine days he had sat in the cave, and he had been promised that fifty would finish the work. Then two thieves came in out of the dark with a stolen water buffalo, and because they needed the meat and the cave was convenient, they cut the animal’s head off on the floor in front of him. The blood steamed in the cold. He asked them, reasonably enough, to wait a few minutes more. They took his head off too.

What happened next is the part Tibet remembers. The headless hermit reached down, picked up the buffalo’s head and set it on his own shoulders, and stood up as Yama, Lord of Death. He killed the thieves and drank their blood out of cups made from their skulls, and then, still not satisfied, he started for the rest of the country. The people of Tibet prayed to Manjushri, the gentle bodhisattva of wisdom who carries a sword and a book. Manjushri answered by taking a shape that mirrored Yama’s own and multiplied it: the same buffalo head, the same fury, ten times over. He beat the Lord of Death, and instead of destroying him, put him under oath as a guardian of the teachings. That is the story told in Tibet. The tantric texts tell it differently. The cave and the thieves belong to popular telling rather than to scripture, and the texts themselves care far more about what the shape means than about where it came from.

The name is a compound and a job description. Yama is death, antaka is the one who ends a thing, and Yamantaka is the ender of Yama. Strictly speaking the word belongs to a much smaller figure: a blue attendant with one face and two hands who stands in the outer protection circle of wrathful mandalas beside Padmantaka, Prajnantaka and Vighnantaka, four deities whose names all close the same way. The colossus that everyone actually means when they say Yamantaka is Vajrabhairava. The Tibetan tradition has been cheerfully conflating the two for centuries, and the confusion is old enough now to be part of the record.

Look at him properly and the arithmetic is the first thing that hits. Nine faces: the buffalo at the centre with its snout wrinkled and red as molten copper and its breath described as the wind at the end of time, three faces to its right and three to its left, above it the blood-mouthed red face of an angry demon, and crowning the whole stack the small yellow face of Manjushri as a youth, three-eyed, mildly annoyed at most. Thirty-four arms fan out behind him in two tiers like the vanes of something mechanical. Sixteen legs, eight bent and eight extended, plant him leaning to the right on a golden sun disc. He wears fifty freshly severed heads on a thread of twisted intestine, two black snakes across his chest, bone wheels and bone bracelets and a bone apron with sixty-four hanging loops, and ash from cremation grounds smeared into his skin. His first right and left hands hold a curved chopper above a skull cup of blood at his heart. The rest carry a pestle, a fish knife, a harpoon, an axe, an arrow, an iron hook, a skull club, a discus, a hammer, a sword, a small drum, the four-faced head of Brahma, a shield, a severed leg, a bow, a noose of entrails, a bell. Behind his back, stretched between two upper hands, hangs the flayed skin of an elephant with the legs still on it.

Under his feet are eight mammals, eight birds, and then, pushed face-down beneath those, the great gods of the older Indian world: Brahma, Indra, Rudra, Vishnu, Kumara, elephant-headed Ganesha, the moon and the sun.

None of this is decoration. The nine faces are read as the nine categories of scripture, the two horns as the two truths those scriptures teach, the thirty-four arms together with his body, speech and mind as the thirty-seven aspects of the path to awakening, the sixteen legs as the sixteen kinds of emptiness. A practitioner is not looking at a monster. He is looking at a diagram he is expected to hold in mind all at once, which is precisely why it has so many parts.

The historical trail runs the other way from the legend. Yamantaka is already in the Manjushri Root Tantra in the seventh century and already in the Guhyasamaja system, long before any text called Vajrabhairava exists. The Vajrabhairava material itself is credited to Lalitavajra, a tenth-century master of Nalanda who came from Orissa, found the deity’s names in a few tantalising lines of the Chanting of the Names of Manjushri, and could not locate the tantra anywhere in India. He practised twenty years for a vision, was told to go to Oddiyana, walked to what is now the Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan, and came home with three texts he had committed to memory because they were too large to carry. Scholarship traces the underlying material to non-Buddhist Shaiva ground in that same northwest, which the name half admits: Bhairava is the terrible form of Shiva, and this deity is the vajra version of him.

Atisha carried the texts into Tibet, where they sat at Radreng monastery for a while with nobody entirely sure what they were. Ra Lotsawa Dorje Drak, born at Nyenam in 1016, went down to Nepal to find out, and had to work for it: his teacher Bharo denied having the transmission at all, was caught out at a cave shrine with the offerings still set before a painting of the deity, and only then explained that the teaching was the heart of the dakinis and he felt guilty giving it away. Ra Lotsawa got it, translated it, and spread it so successfully that his lineage soaked into every one of the new translation schools without ever founding one of its own. Tsongkhapa took it up in the fourteenth century and made it central, and Vajrabhairava has been one of the three principal meditational deities of the Gelug school ever since, alongside Guhyasamaja and Chakrasamvara. From there the practice went to Mongolia, where it pushed older shamanic exorcism aside, and then to the Manchus, who noticed that their own name sounded like Manjushri, identified their emperors accordingly, and laid Beijing out as a Vajrabhairava mandala with the Forbidden City at its heart and the emperor at the centre of it.

At dawn in a shrine room, none of that ferocity is visible. There is a hand drum, a bell, a butter lamp guttering, a low continuous recitation, and a man sitting still with his eyes half closed building a palace in his head and putting himself in the middle of it with nine faces and thirty-four arms. The mantra is counted out three hundred thousand times for a short retreat.

His power is a single power described many ways. Death is the metaphor and the mechanism both: the practice imitates the process of dying in order to reach the subtlest level of mind that ordinarily surfaces only at death, and to use it for understanding rather than let it pass unnoticed. Everything else follows from that. He is held to be proof against interference in a degenerate age, meaning the four maras, of which death is one and the rest are hardly better. He is the container in which the Gelug tradition folds its other tantric systems together, and the protector practices with them, Yama Dharmaraja and six-armed Mahakala and Palden Lhamo riding at his feet.

His limits are the ones his own history keeps insisting on. He cannot be taken up casually, and the tradition is unembarrassed about the gatekeeping: Bharo gave the transmission only after months of refusal and told Ra Lotsawa to hand it on to as few people as possible, and when Ra Lotsawa gave it to too many he is said to have regretted it and not to have finished the work in that lifetime. The wrath is borrowed, not owned; strip it away and the thing on top of the stack is a boy with a book. And for all the weaponry he is useless as an object of petition, because he was never meant to be looked at from outside. He is a costume, and the point is to be wearing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Yamantaka?

Yamantaka is the wrathful form of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, in Tibetan Buddhism. His name means “the one who puts an end to Yama”, the Lord of Death. In his most familiar buffalo-headed form he is also called Vajrabhairava, and he is one of the three principal meditational deities of the Gelug school alongside Guhyasamaja and Chakrasamvara.

Why does Yamantaka have a buffalo head?

The story told in Tibet is that a hermit one day short of completing fifty years of meditation was beheaded by two thieves who had already beheaded a stolen water buffalo in his cave. He put the buffalo’s head on his own shoulders, became Yama, and went on a killing spree, so Manjushri took the same buffalo-headed shape but far more terrible in order to stop him. The buffalo head is also read as deliberate mirroring, since Yamantaka’s practice imitates death in order to master it.

What is the difference between Yamantaka and Vajrabhairava?

Strictly, Yamantaka is a minor blue attendant deity with one face and two hands who appears in the outer circle of wrathful mandalas alongside Padmantaka, Prajnantaka and Vighnantaka. Vajrabhairava is the huge buffalo-headed deity with nine faces, thirty-four arms and sixteen legs. Tibetan usage has long applied the name Yamantaka to Vajrabhairava, and the two are now treated as one figure in almost all popular reference to him.

What do Yamantaka’s nine faces and thirty-four arms mean?

Each feature stands for a part of the Buddhist path held in mind simultaneously. The nine faces represent the nine categories of scripture, the two horns the two truths, the thirty-four arms together with his body, speech and mind the thirty-seven aspects of the path to awakening, and the sixteen legs the sixteen kinds of emptiness.

Is Yamantaka evil?

No. Yamantaka is a wrathful form of a bodhisattva of wisdom, and his ferocity is a method rather than a temperament. He did not destroy Yama when he defeated him but bound him under oath as a protector of the Buddhist teachings, and the small peaceful face of Manjushri sits at the top of his nine heads to mark what he actually is.

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Manjushri, Yama, Mahakala, Palden Lhamo, Vajrapani, Hayagriva, Dakini, Tara, Avalokiteśvara, Bodhisattvas, Mara, Kaal Bhairav, Rudra, Yanluo