Yamantaka

Yamāntaka (यमान्तक Yamāntaka) or Vajrabhairava (; ; 대위덕명왕 Daewideok-myeongwang; 大威徳明王 Daiitoku-myōō; Эрлэгийн Жаргагчи Erlig-jin Jarghagchi) is the "destroyer of death" deity of Vajrayana Buddhism. Sometimes he is conceptualized as "conqueror of the lord of death". Of the several deities in the Buddhist pantheon named 'Yamāntaka', the most well known, also called as 'Vajrabhairava' belongs to the Anuttarayoga Tantra class of deities popular within the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. Yamāntaka is a Sanskrit name that can be broken down into two primary elements: Yama (यम), –the god of death; and antaka (अन्तक) –destroyer. Thus, Yamāntaka means “Destroyer of Death” or "Conqueror of Death". While Yamāntaka is therefore Yama's nemesis, his representation mirrors Yama in many ways: he too often rides a buffalo and often depicted with a buffalo's head. Because of this mirroring of appearance and similarity in name, it is not hard to find texts and books (which would appear to be reliable sources of much material) conflate both Yamāntaka and Yama as being the same deity when they are not. Within Buddhism, "terminating death" is a quality of all buddhas as they have stopped the cycle of rebirth, samsara. So Yamāntaka represents the goal of the Mahayana practitioner's journey to enlightenment, or the journey itself: On final awakening, one manifests Yamāntaka – the ending of death. One historic source of name follows Kalantaka, an aspect of the Hindu god Shiva who saves his follower from the clutches of death Yama and is seen as the deity of adherence and origin of the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra of Buddhism and Hinduism. In Buddhism, Yamāntaka is a wrathful expression of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom who, in other contexts, also functions as a dharmapala or a Heruka. He adopted this form in order to defeat Yama, the lord of death who was arrogantly interfering with karma by claiming victims before their time was up. Yamantaka submitted Yama by terrorizing him with his form, one even more frightening than that of Yama himself, which at the same time also acted as mirror of Yama's horrible appearance.