The Vajra and Bell in Tibetan Buddhism

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 13 August 2026 · Updated 23 September 2026

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The vajra and bell are the paired ritual implements of Tibetan (Vajrayana) Buddhism — held and used together in tantric practice, and together embodying the two inseparable wings of the path.

The vajra (Tibetan dorje), in the right hand, is method and compassion; the bell (ghaṇṭā), in the left, is wisdom and emptiness. To hold both is to enact their union — the very heart of Vajrayana. They are among the most recognisable of all Buddhist ritual symbols, and — importantly — not a pan-Buddhist one but a tantric one. (Buddhists elsewhere ring and strike quite different bells for quite different reasons — see why Buddhists ring bells.)

What the vajra and bell are

Watch a Tibetan lama perform a ritual and you will see the two objects in constant, choreographed use: a small metal scepter in the right hand and a hand-bell in the left, ringing, turning, crossing at the chest. These are not merely tools of ceremony. The vajra and the bell are a teaching in the hands — a way of holding, and enacting, the two qualities whose union is awakening in the Vajrayana understanding: skilful, compassionate action, and the wisdom that sees the emptiness of all things. Neither alone suffices; the whole path is their marriage.

Where the vajra came from

The vajra is older than Buddhism, and its first life was a violent one. Himalayan Art Resources, the standard iconographic database, traces the term to Vedic literature, where it is “the scepter of the god Indra, a god of thunder and war, namely a lightning bolt or lightning bolt scepter hurled from the hand, intended as a weapon”; in the Puranic material it is a weapon forged from the bones of a sage. Buddhism inherited a thrown weapon, kept its shape, and changed what it was for.

The word is already in the early Pali discourses, and one of the places it turns up is a name rather than an object. In the Ambaṭṭha Sutta a proud young brahmin, asked an awkward question about his ancestry, twice says nothing; the Buddha warns that a third silence will cost him his head. Then something becomes visible above him.

Vajirapāṇī is the Pali spelling of the name the bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi carries in Sanskrit. And the weapon sense did not simply fall away when the vajra reached the shrine: Himalayan Art Resources notes that when it is held “in the upraised right hand of the deity Vajrapani, in wrathful form, the vajra is understood to be a weapon”, “a throwing weapon intended to stun the victim”. What Buddhism changed was less the force of the thing than what it is aimed at.

One note on the English. “Diamond” is a translation convention rather than the word’s meaning: Himalayan Art Resources records that diamond and adamantine were found “wholly inadequate and misleading” as renderings of vajra and “are now generally no longer employed”, even while they remain fair descriptions of what a vajra is like. The Tibetan is plainer. Dorje joins do, stone, to je, best or highest — “the best stone.”

The vajra

The vajra — in Tibetan, dorje — is conventionally rendered both “thunderbolt” and “diamond,” and it carries both senses at once. Like a thunderbolt it is sudden and irresistible, cutting through ignorance; like a diamond it is clear, pure, and indestructible — the perfect image of the unbreakable nature of the awakened mind. What Buddhism did with Indra’s thunderbolt, described above, was to keep the shape and change what it is turned against: in the practitioner’s hand it is not a weapon of war but a symbol of enlightenment.

Held in the right hand, the vajra stands for method or skilful means (upāya) and for active compassion — the dynamic, world-engaging side of the path. Its form is distinctive: a central shaft with a set of prongs at each end that curve inward to meet at the tips, enclosing a small sphere.

Five prongs or nine

The prong count is not decoration, and it is not uniform across Tibetan Buddhism. Himalayan Art Resources sets the division out plainly: “The nine pronged configuration is the vajra most commonly used by the Nyingma Tradition of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism. The five pronged configuration is the vajra used by the new schools, or Sarma Traditions: Sakya, Kagyu, Jonang, Gelug, etc.” A vajra on a shrine is therefore often a quiet indicator of which lineage the practitioner stands in. Other forms do other work: a single-pronged vajra is related to nāga rituals; a five-pronged vajra whose tips stand open instead of closing on the central prong is a “wrathful” vajra; and the twenty-pronged crossed vajra (viśvavajra) represents activity.

What the prongs mean is answered differently by different masters, and it is worth hearing one of them rather than reporting a consensus that does not exist. The Nyingma master Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpé Nyima takes the object apart piece by piece:

The five prongs are also widely associated with the five Buddha families — traditional interpretation rather than fixed doctrine, and in any case one lineage’s reading rather than a Tibetan consensus.

The bell

The bell — Sanskrit ghaṇṭā, Tibetan drilbu — is the vajra’s inseparable partner. Held in the left hand, it symbolises wisdom (prajñā) and emptiness (śūnyatā); for what a named teacher makes of the sound of the bell, see Lama Zopa Rinpoche below. The bell is often understood to embody Prajñāpāramitā, the “Perfection of Wisdom” herself. Look closely and you will see that its handle is topped by a half-vajra — the two implements are, even in their form, made for each other.

How to read a bell

A Tibetan bell is a small, legible catalogue of symbols, and once you know the parts you can read one in your hands. Himalayan Art Resources sets the handle out from the top down as the point of the central prong, five prongs, four makara (sea-monster) heads, an eight-petalled lotus, a five-petalled crown, a face, and an initiation vase; and the bell below it as the neck, an eight-petalled lotus, eight syllables, a horizontal ring of vajras, a band of kīrtimukha faces and auspicious emblems, a vertical ring of vajras, the syllables oṃ āḥ hūṃ inside the dome, and the clapper on its string.

Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpé Nyima reads those same features as a map of the practice. The garland of vajras, he writes, “signifies the meditative equipoise in which the enlightened mind of the victorious ones never departs from dharmatā”; the vase stands for the completeness, within primordial wisdom, of all the qualities of the paths and stages; the sea-monster faces stand for great compassion.

The face on the handle is named differently in different hands, and the difference is worth noticing rather than smoothing away. The iconographic outline labels it Prajñāpāramitā, the Perfection of Wisdom. Dodrupchen’s commentary calls it Dhātvīśvarī, and reads it as “directly seeing the nature of all phenomena through the primordial wisdom of great bliss.” Both are describing the same cast face; which name you meet depends on which text you are reading.

Held together: the union of method and wisdom

The deepest meaning lies not in either object but in the two held together. In Vajrayana, awakening is the union of method and wisdom — of compassion and emptiness. Compassion without the wisdom of emptiness can become attachment; wisdom without compassion can become cold. Only together are they the path. And so the practitioner holds the vajra (method, compassion) in the right hand and the bell (wisdom, emptiness) in the left, and in key moments crosses the hands at the heart — the two becoming one. The whole philosophy of the “Diamond Vehicle” is enacted in a single gesture.

How they are held, and on what occasion

The hand assignment is not a convention invented by reference books; it is written into the liturgies practitioners recite. In the Longchen Nyingtik tradition a short text for blessing the vajra and bell is said before the refuge and the visualisation of the field of merit — the opening moves of a session — and gives the instruction gesture by gesture, with a mantra for each.

Three things in that short instruction answer questions the photographs never do. The vajra goes to the right hand and the bell to the left, as a matter of liturgical rubric rather than aesthetics. The bell is rung and then rested at the hip — it is not held up throughout. And the crossing of the arms at the chest has a name, the embracing mudrā, and a fixed place in the sequence, after both implements have been blessed.

The same text says in its first line why a practitioner owns them at all: “One of the samayas of the Vajrayāna is to keep a vajra and bell.” Samaya is the Vajrayāna word for the commitments a practitioner takes on, and this liturgy counts owning the pair among them — which is why, in Tibetan practice, these are less like ornaments than like a monastic’s robes.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche, spiritual director of the FPMT — an organisation that describes itself as “based on the Buddhist tradition of Lama Tsongkhapa of Tibet” — taught at a 2017 retreat in Italy that the two are to be held together rather than one at a time, and that the bell’s sound is itself the instruction.

Who uses them, and is an empowerment needed?

These are tantric implements, and in Tibetan practice they belong to people who have entered tantric practice by way of an empowerment. Before conferring an Avalokiteśvara empowerment in Tokyo in 2015, the 14th Dalai Lama stated the general rule plainly: an empowerment is necessary if you want to practise tantra. The account on his official site records that he then explained the two objects in his own hands: “the vajra represented deity yoga, while the bell represented understanding of emptiness”, and the pair are employed together “to show that deity yoga and wisdom are indivisible.”

Set that beside Dodrupchen’s reading and the difference is instructive. Both keep method in the vajra and wisdom in the bell. But this Gelug teacher names the method deity yoga — the practitioner, in his words, “visualizing him or herself in the form of a deity” — where Dodrupchen names it the “primordial wisdom of great bliss as the method.” There is no single Tibetan account of these objects; there are lineages, each explaining the implement from inside its own practice.

None of which makes a vajra or a bell forbidden to look at, study, photograph or keep respectfully. It does mean that a pair bought as decoration is not the same object as a pair kept under samaya, and that ritual use of them properly waits on a teacher.

The pairing is also not quite as exclusively Tibetan as it looks. It travelled with Vajrayāna wherever Vajrayāna went: Himalayan Art Resources notes that vajras “are also found with Buddhists of South-east Asia, particularly Java, and with the Shingon Buddhists of Japan.” Theravāda does not use them. The accurate statement is not that the vajra and bell are Tibetan but that they are tantric — and Tibet is where that tantric inheritance survived most completely.

As with every Buddhist ritual object, the vajra and bell are not gods and not magic weapons. They are symbolic supports — a way of taking the two great qualities to be united in oneself and making them concrete, holdable, and present. The practitioner is not wielding power over the world but rehearsing, hand and heart, the union that is enlightenment.

For the other characteristic Tibetan ritual, see the seven offering bowls; for the wisdom the bell embodies, emptiness and the Heart Sutra; for the lineages whose vajras differ, the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism; and for the tradition itself, Tibetan Buddhism.