Dakini: The Sky-Goer of Tibetan Buddhism

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 8 November 2026

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A dakini (Sanskrit ḍākinī; Tibetan khandro, “sky-goer”) is a female figure of the Buddhist tantras. In Indian literature at large, ḍākinīs are powerful and often dangerous spirits; in the higher tantras they are embodiments of awakening, the most popular being Vajrayoginī; and the name is also given to outstanding women practitioners such as Yeshe Tsogyal. The figure belongs to Vajrayana, above all to Tibetan Buddhism.

What does dakini mean?

Tibetan translators rendered the Sanskrit ḍākinī in two ways. 84000’s notes to The Dhāraṇī of the Supreme Stem Ornament (Toh 1066, translated by Catherine Dalton) suggest that phra men ma “was used more frequently to render the idea of ḍākinīs as a class of potentially malevolent female spirits”; mkha’ ‘gro ma, “while also used to refer to such worldly spirits, was preferred for the ‘wisdom’ ḍākinīs in the higher tantras.” The second is the familiar one: “The Tibetan word for dakini, khandro,” Michaela Haas writes, “means ‘sky-goer’ or ‘space-dancer.’” The Sanskrit word’s own origin is uncertain: Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources (HAR) writes that it “is believed to be a pre-Sanskrit, possibly Dravidian in origin, abstract term.” Its male counterpart is the ḍāka.

84000’s glossary to the Equal to the Sky tantra calls ḍākinīs “a class of powerful non-human female beings” in Indic and Buddhist literature, “liminal and often dangerous beings,” and adds: “In the higher Buddhist tantras, ḍākinīs are often considered embodiments of awakening and feature prominently in tantric maṇḍalas.”

From cremation-ground spirit to wisdom figure

Judith Simmer-Brown’s history of the figure in Dakini’s Warm Breath (2001), as Noelle Oxenhandler’s review summarises it, runs from “roots that begin in pre-Buddhist India” to “a central symbol within the tantric path.” Watt: “A traditional common understanding is that the dakini are harmful witches and spirits.” In Shaiva religion, he adds, there are “vast hordes of dakini, ugly and disheveled, that are followers of Shiva.” The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is blunter: in Hinduism a ḍākinī is “a female spirit or deity who eats the flesh and heart of humans nearing death.”

At a 2016 Zurich conference, as Olga Serbaeva Saraogi’s report summarises it, David Gray spoke on horror in the Buddhist tantras, with the cremation ground as “the playground of the terrifying witches (i.e. ḍākinīs)”; such passages, the report adds, almost always allow an inward reading, “bringing all those terrifying encounters with the ḍākinīs from outside within the subtle body of the practitioner.” The places changed hands too. The twenty-four sacred sites (pīṭha) of the Saṃvara and Hevajra tantras, Elizabeth McDougal writes, citing Geoffrey Samuel and Ronald Davidson, “appear to have originally been Śakta sites that were later appropriated by Buddhist tantra.”

The higher tantras of the Nyingma tradition, 84000 adds, feature phra men ma “as a class of protective deities on the periphery of the maṇḍala of wrathful deities” in the zhi khro maṇḍala of peaceful and wrathful deities, with “female bodies, animal heads.” One zhi khro cycle, Karma Lingpa’s, is the source of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The kinds of dakini

In tantric Buddhism, Watt writes, ḍākinīs are “divided into three categories of mundane, activity and wisdom,” and that “the Wisdom Dakini are synonymous with Chakrasamvara and other highest meditational deities and equal to complete buddhas in realization.” His outline lists other divisions, among them:

• “very outer, outer, inner, secret”;
• the five Buddha-family ḍākinīs: Buddha (white, Vairocana), Vajra (blue, Akṣobhya), Padma (red, Amitābha), Ratna (yellow, Ratnasambhava) and Karma (green, Amoghasiddhi);
• the Three Roots: guru, meditational deity (iṣṭadevatā) and ḍākinī.

Equal to the Sky, a commentarial tantra of the Cakrasaṃvara cycle, has its own scheme. It is addressed to three ḍākinīs, the sky dweller (khecarī), the earth dweller and the subterranean dweller, which, in its translator Daniel McNamara’s summary, it correlates with the subtle body’s winds, channels and drops.

Simmer-Brown’s study works on four levels. As Haas quotes her, on the secret level the ḍākinī is called “the formless wisdom nature of the mind itself”; on the inner, ritual level she is “a meditational deity”; on the outer, subtle-body level “the energetic network of the embodied mind in the subtle channels and vital breath of tantric yoga.” She is also “spoken of as a living woman.”

Vajrayoginī and the dakinis of the lineages

Vajrayoginī

At the head of HAR’s list of the most popular ḍākinīs stands Vajrayoginī (Tibetan rdo rje rnal ‘byor ma), whose practices “originate with the Chakrasamvara Cycle of Tantras.” HAR calls her “a representation of complete buddhahood in female form” and says that “although found in a variety of forms she is common to all schools of Tibetan Buddhism.” Each school has its own ḍākinī traditions (see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism):

• Sakya. Nāropa’s form, the “Khechari of Naropa,” is “one of the five principal tantric practices of the Sakya School,” and three forms of Vajrayoginī, the Three Red Ones, open the Sakya set called the Thirteen Golden Dharmas. HAR traces the lineage from Vajradhara and Vajrayoginī through Nāropa to Sachen Kunga Nyingpo.
• Gelug. Nāropa’s form “has also become popular within the Gelugpa Tradition” (HAR).
• Kagyu. In the Karma Kagyu telling of Nāropa’s life, “a dakini appeared to him, telling him that meditation practice was more important than philosophizing,” and sent him to Tilopa.
• Nyingma. Nyangral Nyima Özer’s Tröma Nakmo is a practice of “noble Vajrayoginī the Black Wrathful Lady” (Lotsawa House). HAR adds that some traditions, “such as the Nyingma,” often explain Prajñāpāramitā, Samantabhadrī, Vajrayoginī, Tārā and Yeshe Tsogyal “as being the same entity but in various forms.”

Lotsawa House marks her sādhanas, among them one attributed to Nāropa, as restricted texts; this page describes no practice.

Women called ḍākinī

“The historical figures of Yeshe Tsogyal, Machig Labdron, Sukhasiddhi, Niguma and others are often described as being dakinis,” HAR writes. Holly Gayley calls Yeshe Tsogyal “a foremost disciple and consort of Padmasambhava,” while noting that most of what is known of her life is “highly mythologized”; her own page tells her story. Machig Labdrön was, in Lotsawa House’s description, the “principal holder of the Chöd lineage.” Niguma and Sukhasiddhi, Lion’s Roar writes, are the “two female founders of the Shangpa Kagyu school,” and both appear there as ḍākinīs: “the dakini Sukhasiddhi” and, in the passage it quotes from Tāranātha, “the dakini Niguma.” (On whether Niguma was Nāropa’s sister or his consort, see our Nāropa page.)

The title lives on in names such as Sera Khandro Kunzang Dekyong Wangmo (1892–1940), “the famous treasure-revealer,” and Gyarong Khandro Dechen Wangmo, “a female treasure-revealer and famed ḍākinī of recent times,” as Lotsawa House describes them. Khandro Rinpoche, quoted by Haas, sums up the usage: “Traditionally, the term dakini has been used for outstanding female practitioners, consorts of great masters, and to denote the enlightened female principle of nonduality which transcends gender.”

Keepers of hidden teachings

Equal to the Sky entrusts teachings as well as places to ḍākinīs, tying its twenty-four sacred sites to twenty-four of them:

Concealment for later revelation is also the theme of the treasure (terma) tradition, most common, a 2026 Tricycle overview notes, in the Nyingma school. Yeshe Tsogyal is celebrated, Gayley writes, for “transcribing Padmasambhava’s teachings and concealing them as treasures”; the overview names female revealers “from Jomo Menmo in the 13th century to Sera Khandro in the 20th,” and adds that questions of authenticity “remain unresolved.”

The dakini as a symbol

Tertön Sogyal Lerab Lingpa’s praise of Red Vajravārāhī, a form of Vajrayoginī, reads her attributes one by one as signs:

The sow’s head at her crown, the praise goes on, is “a sign that you proclaim the unborn dharma.”

Khandro Rinpoche, as Haas quotes her, calls the ḍākinī principle “a very sharp, brilliant wisdom mind that is uncompromising, honest, with a little bit of wrath,” and adds: “To really meet the dakini, you have to go beyond duality.” Oxenhandler’s review sums up Simmer-Brown’s ḍākinī as “the ultimate symbol of the ultimate wisdom of Buddhism: Form is emptiness and emptiness form” (see emptiness).

Does the dakini ideal empower women?

Western interpreters have read the ḍākinī in sharply different ways.

• Jungian. In Simmer-Brown’s survey, as Oxenhandler summarises it, Jungians have treated the ḍākinī “primarily as the dark anima.”
• Feminist critique. For feminists, the same review says, the ḍākinī “when not celebrated as goddess figure” represents “an appropriation of the feminine for predominantly male consumption.” June Campbell, once a translator for Tibetan lamas, told Tricycle in 1996 that women “are transcendentalized into goddesses, dakinis, female aspects of being that men must associate with in order to reach enlightenment,” and argued that they were excluded from the sacred domain “except under conditions laid down by men.”
• Feminist history. Miranda Shaw’s Passionate Enlightenment (1994), in its publisher’s description, rejects the view that women in the tantric movement were “at best marginal and subordinated and at worst degraded and exploited,” presenting “extensive evidence of the outspoken and independent female founders of the Tantric movement.” When Tricycle raised the book, Campbell replied: “But they were all from a thousand years ago; for five hundred years tantric female voices have largely disappeared.”
• Consent and suspicion. Simmer-Brown sought, in Oxenhandler’s words, “a more fundamental, and less polarizing, approach,” drawing on Paul Ricoeur: in a passage the review quotes, she pairs consent to the symbol with “a critical quality that Ricoeur terms ‘suspicion’”, which separates its essential qualities from “phantasms created by cultural overlay.”

Haas names the gap between symbol and social life: “While iconic archetypes of feminine enlightenment were erected on shrines, few women in Tibet were actually emboldened to follow in their footsteps.” The Ḍākinīs’ Great Dharma Treasury, compiled by nuns of Larung Gar and published in 2017, gathers 53 volumes of writings by and about Buddhist women; Sarah Jacoby and Padma ‘tsho place it within “an autobiographical and historical impulse in Tibet that has otherwise favored male Buddhist figures.” The wider questions belong to women in Buddhism and can a woman become a Buddha?

How the traditions differ

As an embodiment of awakening, the ḍākinī belongs to the tantras: 84000 places that role in “the higher Buddhist tantras,” HAR in “Tantric Buddhism and specifically the Chakrasamvara literature.” Beyond them, the word means different things in different places:

Mia’s late 14th-century scroll Dakiniten, the Buddhist Manifestation of the Shinto Deity Inari shows her riding a white fox, and its text traces her to the Indian ḍākinī: in Japan the deity “entered the Buddhist canon as a converted Hindu goddess, Dakiniten,” and was “further conflated with the Shinto kami (deity) Inari, who was associated with abundance, especially of rice.” Toyokawa Inari, formally Myōgonji, a Sōtō Zen temple founded in 1441, enshrines Toyokawa Dakini Shinten as its guardian (chinju); because she carries rice and rides a white fox, its site explains, the popular name “Toyokawa Inari” spread (see Buddhism in Japan). Neither source links this temple guardian to the wisdom ḍākinī of the Tibetan tantras; the two share an Indian root, not a role.

For the wider company of these figures, see buddhas and bodhisattvas; for the fierce guardians of the teaching, see dharma protectors.