Skeletons, whether lying down in a cemetery, hanging over the branch of a tree, standing, walking, dancing, or in a pair, always represent impermanence and death in Himalayan art. This goes back to the Pali canon’s meditations on the stages of corpse decomposition. The skeleton is the ultimate decomposition; there’s really nothing left, unless you grind up the bones.

The dancing skeletons, which we see here, are properly named in Sanskrit: Shri Shmashana Adhipati, or “Revered Lords of the Cemetery.” The term Chitipati, or “Lord of the funeral pyre,” is also commonly used nowadays, but this word does not exist in any of the ritual texts or the root tantras.

The Shri Shmashana Adhipati comes from a text called The Secret Mind Wheel Tantra, part of the Chakrasamvara cycle of tantras. There are three ways to view these figures. The first is as meditational deities. In this practice, they are actually protector deities and sometimes wealth deities. The second is as dancing figures, which we will discuss more below. The third area is cemetery scenes. In depictions of these scenes, it’s naturally very common to have one or two or more skeletons. These skeletons represent impermanence and signal that the cemetery is a frightening place where you have to be even more aware, more conscious, because it may be full of zombies and all sorts of terrible things.

There is a Shmashana Adhipati dance in the Sakya tradition (one of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism), but it was developed only about 250 years ago. It doesn’t go back 900 years, as the practice from The Secret Mind Wheel Tantra does. Other traditions might have adopted some form of skeleton dance as well.

You would normally see images like these in the protector chapel of a monastery or a temple. They would be community commissions for the traditions that have Shri Shmashana Adhipati as one of their main protectors. For an individual devotee of this practice, you would likely have a small painting done, or a small clay figure or small sculpture.

The dancing skeletons we see here, in a painting dating to roughly the 19th century, are meant to be frightening. Each dancer—one male, one female—holds a fused spine staff and a skull cup full of blood. The female can also hold a sheaf of barley or rice in her right hand, signifying abundance, and in her left hand, she has a golden vase, representing wealth. The skulls they wear represent the five aggregates and the five wisdoms, meaning complete Buddhahood. That makes them wisdom deities rather than worldly deities. The landscape where they exist is not one you’ll see out your window. It’s not part of samsara. They are emanations. This is an interesting subject: Which deities are alive and which are emanations?

The skeleton is the ultimate decomposition.

Maybe the only unique thing about this particular depiction is that one figure stands on a conch shell and the other on a cowry shell, which are believed to have protective properties. They stand on a sun disk, representing the thought of enlightenment, and they’re completely surrounded by flames of pristine awareness.

They both wear hair ribbons, even though they don’t have any hair, and this is an artistic convention, to add visual interest to the composition. These hair ribbons may have developed out of the dance mentioned above rather than being part of the iconography. All of these decorative ribbons may be a case of art imitating life, because we don’t have those in the original images of Shri Shmashana Adhipati. They appear only in more modern images.

As far as the oldest images go, we can go back to the 13th or 14th century, but we will not find the skeleton deities as central figures. They will appear as secondary figures within a larger composition along with other protectors, because it was not a major practice. Skeleton figures generally appeared in the lower corners of paintings back then, since the practice was more a minor protection practice that required initiation and a twenty-one-day retreat.

These figures were pulled to the fore at some point later. And the open landscape behind them, with floating figure paintings, appears only in the modern era, say the last few hundred years or so, beginning in the 17th century.

There is a tremendous amount of artistic variation in the iconography of the two dancing skeletons. The artist has a fair amount of flexibility to place the arms and legs in different positions. The male should be dancing on his right leg, and the female on the left, which is the case here, but beyond that there is a lot of interesting artistic invention and variation, if you look at a number of these images.

They’re not as static as a lot of forms that we’re used to, as with Avalokiteshvara or Kalachakra. There’s an acceptance in these depictions for the artists to be creative. There’s a certain freedom that comes out and makes for very entertaining images.

The post The Dancing Skeletons appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The red dancing figure seen here is the dakini Vajrayogini, a Tantric deity who is the female counterpart to Chakrasamvara, the chief deity of the Chakrasamvara Tantras, an important collection of Buddhist texts and practices.

Vajrayogini is one of the most important, most often reproduced figures in Himalayan art, sculpture, and painting, going back as early as the 8th or 9th century. This particular image is from Bhutan and dates to the 19th century.

But what exactly is a dakini? As with all Tantric deities, representations of dakinis have three meanings: outer, inner, and secret. The outer meaning will be discussed here. Practitioners can learn the secret meanings of Tantric deity representations only when they complete more profound teachings on the practice, and this may require retreats of three months, six months, and so on.

There are three types of deity appearances: peaceful, wrathful, and then semi-peaceful/semi-wrathful, which falls somewhere in between. This depiction is the third type and is also referred to as Vajravarahi, which refers to the sow’s head next to the face, described below.

Vajrayogini dances atop a prone figure, representing the ego. In Tantric Buddhism, one practice is to meditate on oneself as a deity. The purpose of this practice is to open up the mind to the idea that we don’t have to be who we usually think we are—a samsaric delusional being. We can be something else, and to do that, we have to suppress the ego, which we see here being trampled underfoot. This prone figure should not be looked at literally as a dead body.

In her right hand, Vajrayogini holds a hooked blade, a knife used for skinning, and it has a vajra handle. (If you’ve ever seen someone skin a deer, then you know that you don’t use a straight knife.) In her left hand, she has a skull bowl, and it’s full of what looks like blood and is generally described as the blood of the four Maras, tempters who need to be defeated along with the ego. She also has a khatvanga staff in the crook of her arm. This staff is a stand-in for Vajrayogini’s consort, the wrathful aspect of Chakrasamvara, as well as the other deities of the mandala. Its presence indicates that she is part of something larger.

Vajrayogini is one of the most important, most often reproduced figures in Himalayan art. 

To the left of her face, which is her right side, there is a sow’s head. Vajrayogini is also called, in Tibetan, shal nyi ma, meaning two-faced, because of these two heads. And of the two heads, the sow’s head is more important, because the main face represents relative truth. The sow’s head represents the ultimate truth, since sows often find food under the ground that no one else can see. This is a metaphor for digging out the ego and reaching enlightenment.

She also wears a garland of fifty freshly severed heads, representing the Sanskrit alphabet. At least, that’s one meaning of the severed heads. The secret meaning is accessible only to students of the tantra.

At the top of the composition, the lama with the blue hat is a Gyalwang Drukchen. If you meet the current Gyalwang Drukchen, who lives in Ladakh, you’ll see that he often wears this blue hat. This is one of his predecessors from the 19th century. All three figures are Bhutanese teachers from the same era.

Several figures surround Vajrayogini. These are her retinue, other yoginis from the Chakrasamvara Tantra. The presence of these figures indicate that Vajrayogini practice is just one part of a larger collection of practices.

An interesting feature of this representation is the dakini at top right dancing on her right leg. This is a highly unusual depiction, since usually only males are depicted this way. The others in this image conform to the depiction, in which dakinis dance on the left leg.

Dakinis emerged from Indian culture, particularly Shaivism, the worship of Shiva. To this day in India, “dakini” refers to a class of cannibalistic, blood-drinking witches. They generally inhabit cemeteries and charnel grounds. Shiva and Durga were said to have hordes of followers called dakini—witches and women warriors—who eventually developed into higher sorts of beings, and Buddhism took the concept from here. The ambivalent nature of dakinis, sometimes helping and sometimes harming humans, is meant to caution practitioners to avoid dualities.

It is common today to see “dakini” used as an epithet, a term of respect and endearment. But the word and its representation are tied to specific practices and have specific meanings in the correct context. Attempting to generalize them leads to confusion.

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