Chinnamunda, and Who May Approach Her

Chhinnamasta has an exact Buddhist counterpart. Chinnamunda Vajrayogini, the severed-headed form of Vajrayogini, appears in Indian Buddhist tantric sources with the same self-decapitation, the same two attendants drinking from two streams, and the same third stream returning to her own mouth, and Tibetan lineages transmit her practice with an origin account involving the sisters Mekhala and Kanakhala. The visual identity is far too close to be coincidence, and the direction of the borrowing is genuinely argued. Some scholars place the Buddhist form first on the strength of earlier datable attestation; others hold that both draw on a shared tantric milieu in eastern India in which the two traditions exchanged material continuously. The atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it.

Her worship within the Hindu tradition is largely restricted to initiated tantric practitioners, and she is not a household deity. She nonetheless has significant public shrines: Chintpurni in Una district, Himachal Pradesh, where the goddess of the site is identified with her, and Rajrappa in Jharkhand, where a temple at the meeting of two rivers draws very large numbers. The distance between an image built for advanced practice and a pilgrimage site with a queue outside it is a normal condition of Indian religion rather than a contradiction within it.