Yamantaka — “the Destroyer of Death,” also called Vajrabhairava — is a supremely wrathful tantric deity of Tibetan Buddhism: the terrifying buffalo-headed conqueror of Yama, the Lord of Death, and a meditational deity (yidam) of the highest tantras. He is the wrathful emanation of the bodhisattva of wisdom, [manjushri], whose ferocity destroys death itself and the ignorance that is its root.
The Conqueror of Death
Yamantaka’s name means “the ender (or terminator) of Yama” — Yama being the Lord of Death — for he is the deity who conquers death itself. The myth tells that the death-god Yama was ravaging the world, and to subdue him, the gentle bodhisattva of wisdom Manjushri took on a form even more terrifying than Yama: the colossal, buffalo-headed, many-armed wrathful deity Yamantaka, who overpowered and subdued the Lord of Death. To conquer death, wisdom assumed the most fearsome form of all.
The Buffalo-Headed Terror
Yamantaka is depicted as one of the most fearsome of all the deities: a huge, dark-blue figure with the head of a buffalo (and often many other heads, including the head of Manjushri at the crown), with many arms wielding many weapons, many legs trampling gods and demons and beasts, wreathed in flames, fanged and terrible. Every detail of his overwhelming form is symbolic — his many heads, arms, and legs representing the many aspects of the path and the powers of enlightenment, his buffalo head recalling Yama, whom he conquered, his ferocity the wrathful energy of wisdom destroying ignorance and death.
The Wisdom That Ends Death
As the wrathful form of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, Yamantaka embodies the truth that it is wisdom — the realization of emptiness and the true nature of reality — that ultimately conquers death, for death has its root in ignorance and the clinging to a self, and wisdom cuts that root. His practice is among the most important of the highest yoga tantras, especially in the Gelug school (the tradition of the Dalai Lamas), undertaken to overcome death, destroy obstacles, and attain swift enlightenment. In Yamantaka, Tibetan Buddhism gave form to the conquest of death by wisdom — the buffalo-headed Destroyer of Death, the supremely wrathful emanation of the bodhisattva of wisdom, who took on a form more terrible than death itself to subdue the Lord of Death and destroy the ignorance at the root of all dying.