Yamantaka

Yamantaka is the "destroyer of death" deity in Vajrayana Buddhism, above riding a water buffalo.
Carved cliff relief of Yamāntaka, one out of a set depicting the Ten Wisdom Kings, at the Dazu Rock Carvings in Chongqing, China. 7th century.

Yamāntaka (Sanskrit: यमान्तक Yamāntaka) or Vajrabhairava (Tibetan: གཤིན་རྗེ་གཤེད་, རྡོ་རྗེ་འཇིགས་བྱེད།, Wylie: gshin rje gshed; rdo rje 'jigs byed; simplified Chinese: 大威德金刚; traditional Chinese: 大威德金剛; pinyin: Dà Wēidé Jīngāng; Korean: 대위덕명왕 Daewideok-myeongwang; Japanese: 大威徳明王 Daiitoku-myōō; Mongolian: Эрлэгийн Жаргагчи Erlig-jin Jargagchi) is the "destroyer of death" deity of Vajrayana Buddhism.[1] Sometimes he is conceptualized as "conqueror of the lord of death".[2] Of the several deities in the Buddhist pantheon named Yamāntaka, the most well known belongs to the Anuttarayoga class of tantra of deities popular within the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.

  1. ^ John Whalen-Bridge; Gary Storhoff (2009). Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, The. State University of New York Press. p. 170. ISBN 978-1-4384-2659-4.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference buswellyamantaka was invoked but never defined (see the help page).