Vajrakilaya's practice lineage is most closely associated within Tibetan Buddhism with the Nyingma school, the tradition tracing its founding to the eighth century Indian master Padmasambhava, and the Kilaya cycle is counted among the most significant of the tantric transmissions linked to him. Nyingma tradition holds that many of its core teachings, including major Vajrakilaya cycles, were concealed by Padmasambhava and his circle to be rediscovered later by qualified treasure revealers, tertons, when conditions were right for their teaching, a transmission model, terma, distinctive to the Nyingma school among Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Multiple such Vajrakilaya revelations exist across Nyingma history, alongside lineages transmitted by uninterrupted oral succession from teacher to student, kama, so that the deity's practice reaches modern practitioners through more than one textual and lineage stream rather than a single fixed source.
Scholarly surveys of Tibetan Buddhism describe wrathful subjugation deities of this kind as occupying a central place in tantric ritual practice generally, not a marginal or exotic corner of it, precisely because obstacles to practice, understood in both an inner psychological and an outer circumstantial sense, are treated as a universal problem every serious practitioner eventually meets. As a living, transmitted practice rather than a historical curiosity, Vajrakilaya's fuller ritual content is understood within the tradition as appropriately received through initiation and instruction from a qualified teacher rather than from a general description such as this one.