Palden Lhamo

Also Known As: Tibetan dpal ldan lha mo, “Glorious Goddess”; Sanskrit Shri Devi; in her two-armed Gelug form Magzor Gyalmo, “Queen Who Repels Armies”; in her four-armed form Dudsolma or Dudmo Remati
Region/Culture: Himalayan Region
Mythos: Tibetan Mythology, Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She turns back armies, plague and invasion, and reads the future in the surface of a lake in southern Tibet.
Role in Mythos: She is the principal female dharmapala of Tibetan Buddhism, guardian of Lhasa, of the Gelug school, and of the reincarnation lineage of the Dalai Lamas.
Relation to Humans: Her wrath is understood as protection rather than malice, and she is propitiated by monks in the windowless protector chapels and, once a year, by crowds of women in the streets of Lhasa. She is also credited with guarding the succession of Tibet’s highest office, which makes her a political presence as much as a devotional one.

The chapel is kept dark on purpose. In a Tibetan monastery the gonkhang, the room reserved for the wrathful protectors, has no windows to speak of, and the paintings hung there are worked on black grounds so the figures rise out of the dark instead of sitting on it. Butter lamps give just enough light to find her. She is coming straight at the viewer across a lake of blood, sidesaddle on a mule, and she is grinning.

The colour of her body is somewhere between deep blue and black, the shade of a bruise. Three eyes. Her hair stands up in a red mass with a crescent moon set into it, and around her neck hangs a garland of severed heads, freshly cut. In her left hand she lifts a skull cup filled with blood. Her right arm is raised clear of her body, gripping a heavy club topped with a vajra, the thunderbolt sceptre, held ready rather than resting. Above her a parasol of peacock feathers throws a canopy of eyes. The mule’s bridle is a knot of live vipers. And on the animal’s left haunch, in the middle of the hide, there is an eye, open and looking out.

The eye has a story, and the story is not a comfortable one. She was once, the telling goes, married to the king of Lanka, a ruler who fed on cruelty and had no use for the Dharma. She had bound herself to turn the kingdom, and when it became clear she could not, she turned on its future instead. She killed her own son, the heir, while his father was away. She drank his blood from his skull. Then she flayed him and threw the skin across her mule’s back for a saddle and rode north out of the kingdom. Her husband came after her and loosed a poisoned arrow that took the mule in the rump. She pulled it free and made the wound into an eye, which has been watching over Tibet ever since.

She killed her own child and kept the skin.

The tradition does not soften this and does not need to. Wrathful protectors in Tibetan Buddhism are not evil beings held on a leash; they are enlightened figures wearing terror as a working uniform, and the horror of the image is the point of it. What the goddess destroys is understood to be obstruction itself, the whole apparatus of harm, and the ferocity is borrowed rather than owned.

There is more than one goddess standing behind the single English name, and the sources are honest about it once you look. The earliest and most textually grounded form is Dudsolma, also called Dudmo Remati, who has four arms and rides a donkey, and whose teachings run through the Fifty Chapter and Twenty-five Chapter Mahakala Tantras, where she is bound closely to Mahakala. She is treated as a wrathful manifestation of Shri Lakshmi. The form most Tibetans and most visitors actually picture, the two-armed rider on the mule, is Magzor Gyalmo, whose history comes from an entirely different text, the Dakinyagnijihajvala Tantra preserved in the Dege Kanjur, and who is understood as a manifestation of Sarasvati. In that text she is the servant or younger sister of the four-armed goddess, not the same being at all. Some teachers now count twenty-one forms and fold in the Bon protectress Sipai Gyalmo besides, but that tidy arrangement looks to be about a century old, a filing system laid over a crowded and much older field.

She does not ride alone. The lion-headed dakini Simhamukha follows behind her and the makara-headed Makaravaktra walks in front with the reins in her hand, and behind them come the four Queens of the Seasons, the five Sisters of Long Life, and the twelve Tenma goddesses, a whole household of protectresses moving over the blood.

Once a year she leaves the dark. On the fifteenth day of the tenth Tibetan month her image is carried out of the Jokhang and paraded through Lhasa, and the Barkhor fills with juniper smoke and the noise of prayer while women bring barley beer, fruit and incense to the goddess. She is the only female protector honoured across all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and the day has become, in practice, a women’s festival.

Her strangest office is a lake. Lhamo Latso sits in the mountains southeast of Lhasa, small and oval and famously bad-tempered with weather, and it is held to be her own soul-lake. She is said to have promised the first Dalai Lama, Gendun Drup, that she would guard the line of his rebirths, and the searchers who have to find each new incarnation have gone to the water to ask her where to look. In 1935 the regent Reting Rinpoche watched its surface and reported three Tibetan letters, a monastery roofed in jade green and gold, and a house with turquoise tiles. The search party went northeast into Amdo, found a house that matched, and the child inside it is the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

What she can do follows from what she is. She repels armies, which is what her commonest name says outright, and she is called on against invasion, epidemic and the collapse of institutions. The eye in the mule’s flank keeps watch over the regions of Tibet without her having to turn her head. She casts lots over human affairs, and her retinue carry the tallies and the sacks of sickness that make those judgements stick. Through the lake she sees forward in time, which is a rarer gift among protectors than the violence is.

What limits her is the vow. She is not a free agent and never was. Her power is licensed by an oath sworn to the Dharma, and it moves only where that oath directs it, which means she can be called but not commanded, and can be offended by sloppy or unauthorised practice. Her rites belong to initiates and are performed behind a closed door in an unlit room for a reason. The goddess who protects a lineage is bound to it, and the wrath that makes her useful is the same thing that makes her dangerous to approach carelessly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Palden Lhamo?

Palden Lhamo, known in Sanskrit as Shri Devi, is the principal female protector deity of Tibetan Buddhism and the guardian of Lhasa, of the Gelug school, and of the Dalai Lamas. She is a dharmapala, a wrathful enlightened figure whose ferocity is directed against obstacles to the Dharma rather than against people, and she is the only female protector venerated across all four Tibetan Buddhist schools.

Why does Palden Lhamo ride a mule with an eye on its haunch?

The eye comes from the legend of her flight from Lanka. After she killed her son and rode north, her husband shot a poisoned arrow that struck the mule’s rump, and Palden Lhamo pulled the arrow out and transformed the wound into an eye that watches over Tibet. The mule’s saddle blanket in the same story is the flayed skin of the son she killed.

What is Palden Lhamo’s connection to the Dalai Lama?

Palden Lhamo is said to have promised the first Dalai Lama, Gendun Drup, that she would protect the reincarnation lineage, and she has been regarded as the personal guardian of every Dalai Lama since. Her lake, Lhamo Latso in southern Tibet, is consulted for visions during the search for each new incarnation. In 1935 the regent Reting Rinpoche saw images in the lake that led the search party to Amdo and to the child who became the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Is Palden Lhamo a demon?

No. Palden Lhamo is a dharmapala, an enlightened protector who takes a terrifying form deliberately, and Tibetan tradition treats her wrath as compassion in a fearsome shape rather than as malice. Her horrific attributes, including the skull cup of blood and the garland of severed heads, are symbolic of the destruction of obstacles rather than signs of an evil nature.

Are there different forms of Palden Lhamo?

Yes, and they come from different texts and different origins. The four-armed Dudsolma, also called Dudmo Remati, rides a donkey, appears in the Mahakala Tantras, and is understood as a wrathful form of Shri Lakshmi, while the two-armed Magzor Gyalmo rides a mule, comes from the Dakinyagnijihajvala Tantra, and is understood as a manifestation of Sarasvati. The system counting twenty-one forms under one name appears to be a recent arrangement rather than an ancient one.