The Indian Buddhist Iconography, Mainly Based on the Sadhanamala and Other Cognate Tantric Texts of Rituals c17.s6.4

c17.s6.4

The name Vajravārāhī or 'adamantine sow' is given to her for the simple reason that she has an excrescence near her right ear which resembles the face of a sow. It is far more likely that Getty's story about Yun-gar's attack on the abbess and the monastery refers to Vajravārāhī than to Mārīcī; for while Mārīcī has one face which may be distorted sow-like, Vajravārāhī has a natural excrescence just near the right ear, which has gained for her the epithet 'Vajraghoṇā' in the Sādhanas. Another argument in favour of this is that, while Vajravārāhī is called a Dākinī, and is associated with four other Dākinīs, she may quite easily be an abbess, and therefore, a Siddha woman deified, and not a goddess. But Mārīcī is decidedly a goddess; she is Vajradhātviśvarī and the consort of a Dhyāni Buddha.