Heduwapa, the great god of White Bones, is named in the Dongba religion of the Naxi as one of three supreme deities together with Igu Ake, the first great cause, and Saluwete, the chief heavenly god. The epithet 'White Bones' ties the deity to the pervasive light-and-dark, white-and-black dualism of Naxi cosmology, in which a luminous 'white' principle of order and ancestry is set against its shadowed counterpart, a polarity that also organizes the Dongba heroic epics. Among the supreme triad Heduwapa is the most sparsely narrated, attested chiefly as a name and rank within the pantheon rather than through a developed myth cycle, and the theology survives almost wholly through the pictographic Dongba manuscripts and their priestly transmission.