Vajrapani is the tradition's admission that compassion alone is not sufficient equipment. He appears in the early texts as the yaksha who accompanies the Buddha and threatens to split the skull of anyone who refuses a fair question three times — comic, and revealing. In Tibetan practice he is the concentrated energy of all buddhas' power, and his wrathful form is used precisely where a practitioner needs force rather than sweetness: against inertia, against fear, against their own evasions. Scholars trace his iconography partly to Herakles, carried east by Greek-Bactrian sculptors in Gandhara, which is why the earliest images of him look like a Mediterranean strongman.