This room contains some Phurbus reproduced to their real size (on a screen 14"). We there distinguish their three parts characteristic morphology.
The high part, constituted generally of three heads. Their differents expressions represent the three aspects of the human emotions: repulsion or hate, desire or joy, neutrality or indifference. The top of these heads may be very variable, and it is the way the human rejoins the divine, the sinciput of the Hindus (saharastra lotus to the thousand petals). According to the shamans, this hat is very different (triangle, circle, various shape). It is a characteristic element of shamanistic wooden Phurbu of which the deep meaning is to decrypt.
The central part of Phurbu is in some way the handful, because it is this place that the shaman tightens in exercise when he dances and waves his symbolic weapon. This part is assimilated to the thunderbolt or vajra in sanscrit, dorje in tibetan. It is the symbol of the weapon of strength, of illumination, the sceptre. However in the shamanistic Phurbu, the representation of dorje is not figurative in a conventional way but its configures in an interlacing of lines and of nodes alike to a weaving, may be drifting from a different and more faraway origin.
The third part is the nail proper with his three facets finishing by an unique tip. These three faces are sculpted and engraved of multiple symbols. One distinguishes in it very often moon, sun, stars, triangles, etc... and almost always some pattern of interlocking snakes, comparable in the Hindu tantrism to the kundalini, and also representative of the telurics strengths. But let us not forget that the shaman, at the moment of the ceremonies, gets in trance, therefore is liable to a curling and vibration of the vertebral column, snake of the architecture of human body. The tip of Phurbu is sometimes reinforced of iron for planting in earth.
Between the dorje and the blade, there is often the representation of an important element: the Makara. This sanscrit term designs a monstrous and mythical creature, mid elephant, mid crocodile, kind of Léviathan who opens very wide an impressive muzzle with sharp teeths. The Makara in the Hindu iconography is this fundamental gargoyle who vomited the primordial waters and the alluviums of all kinds. In what sense does it intervens in the shamanistic in the Phurbu? The blade or nail seems to be the sharp tong of this primordial monster.