Introduction

i.1In The Fearsome Vajra of Destruction, the bodhisattva Vajragarbha asks the Blessed One to explain the meaning of the key words from the tantra’s title. When the Blessed One finishes his initial short exposition of these terms, Vajragarbha, requests a more detailed explanation. The Blessed One assents by further elaborating on the terms, with most of his exposition focused on the term vajra . He explains vajra using the threefold framework of the “true vajra” (don gyi rdo rje), the “symbolic vajra” (rtags kyi rdo rje), and the “material vajra” (rdzas kyi rdo rje). Each of these categories is then elaborated on based on how they crush and destroy the dualistic concepts of subject and object. The Blessed One’s explanation seems to center on the quality of hardness and indestructibility ascribed to a vajra, a term that can also be translated as “diamond.”

i.2The Fearsome Vajra of Destruction is classified as an Unexcelled Yoga class (rnal ’byor bla na med pa’i rgyud), the highest of the four classes of tantra according to the new traditions (gsar ma) of the period of the later transmission (phyi dar) of Buddhism in Tibet. Within this class, the tantra belongs to the so-called Rali tantras (ra li’i rgyud), a group of tantras that form a subset of thirty-two shorter explanatory tantras from the Śaṃvara corpus in the Yoginītantra section (rnal ’byor ma’i rgyud) of the Degé Kangyur. Except for the title that seems to coincidentally contain the term vajrabhairava, which is also the name of the fierce buffalo-headed deity Vajrabhairava, The Fearsome Vajra of Destruction does not appear to have any explicit connection to the corpus associated with Vajrabhairava in the Kangyur. Because of their disputed status as authentic documents of Indian tantric Buddhism, the Rali tantras were excluded from the Kangyurs of Narthang and Lhasa (the latter being mainly based on Narthang).

i.3According to the translator’s colophon, The Fearsome Vajra of Destruction was translated by the Indian paṇḍita Gayādhara and the Tibetan translator Drokmi Lotsāwa Śākya Yeshe (’brog mi lo tsā ba śākya ye shes), who also translated the other thirty-one Rali tantras in this group. This information suggests that the text was translated in the first half of the eleventh century ᴄᴇ. Nothing certain is known about the Indian provenance of these texts, as there are no extant Sanskrit versions and they are not cited or referenced in other works of Indic Buddhism.

i.4This English translation was prepared on the basis of the Tibetan translation preserved in the Degé Kangyur, in consultation with the Stok Palace Kangyur and the comparative notes in the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) of the Degé Kangyur.