Mahākāla
LANE 26 BLOCKED HIM ON A TRADITION-KEY QUESTION AND THIS LANE ANSWERS IT. That census recorded Mahakala, Yamantaka and Acala as blocked because the corpus held wrathful protectors under the Tibetan Buddhist key and none under the Buddhist one, which made the question 'which key' before it was 'what evidence'. He is filed here, under the key that already holds nine protectors, and the Buddhist key is left alone. The six-armed White Mahakala (Gonpo Karpo Chagdrugpa) is named in the source as the most popular of his forms and is carried in this record rather than as a second one; SEVENTY-FIVE FORMS IS A SERIES AND THIS PROGRAMME DOES NOT INGEST SERIES. TYPE deity IS THE NEAREST CATEGORY THIS SCHEMA HAS AND THE TRADITION DOES NOT USE IT; lane 26 escalated this and nothing is decided here.
Domains
- dharma protection
- wrathful compassion
- wealth
Powers
- to carry out numerous tasks simultaneously
Relations
- wrathful form of: Avalokiteśvara
Sources
- Reference treatment of Mahakala, Nagpo Chenpo, 'the Great Black One', regarded in many Tibetan traditions as a wrathful manifestation of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion: more than seventy-five forms are known in Tibet, where he is generally called mGon po, 'Master', 'Lord' or 'Protector'; the six-armed White Mahakala (Gonpo Karpo Chagdrugpa, Shadbhuja Sita Mahakala) is the most popular of these variations and is a wealth deity across all the traditions; his multiple arms are read as his capacity to carry out numerous tasks simultaneously.