From the top, you can see a lovely Bodhi tree, well-tended gardens, two large prayer wheels in their special shelters, and a beautiful little temple. Like most Buddhist temples in Bhutan, there is an open space where people sit to pray, meditate or study. There’s also a big shrine with a serene Sakyamuni Buddha behind the temple.
Walking through the north door, you are immediately faced with the multiplex wrath of Vajrakilaya, the most wrathful of protective deities. This is a huge 15 to 20 feet high sculpture, filling the whole room and encased in glass. It’s too big to grasp as one being; even the main heads are hard to see, being close to the ceiling and obscured by the dizzying detail of the various other manifestations.
There are 103 complete 3-D sculptures, each an aspect of the deity and emerging bodily from his main mass, all in brilliant colours. It’s inconceivable that something so complex and garish should be aesthetically balanced and coherent, but it is absolutely all that.
There is another shrine room, and another wrathful deity statue, not as overwhelming in size and complexity, but still ferociously powerful. Here, however, there is room to sit and meditate. In another stair to the third level, you will find the third wrathful deity, perhaps even more ferocious and energetic. His consort clasps his waist, totally subsumed in energy. She transforms his wrath into acceptance as fully as she can, but there is plenty more beyond her reach, so his potency reaches everywhere.