Dakini

Somewhere in western Malwa, in a year that converts to 423 or 424 of the common era, a Gupta official finished a building programme and had it cut into stone. Most of the inscription is the ordinary boasting of a man who has paid for wells and gardens. Then it reaches the temple he raised for the Mother-goddesses, and the register changes. The house is atyugra, extremely terrible. It is dakinisamprakirnnam, filled with dakinis. The Mothers who live in it, the stone says, churn the oceans with powerful winds that rise out of spells. That is the oldest firmly dated appearance of the word anywhere, and it arrives already meaning something nobody would want built at the end of their lane.

Tradition derives dakini from the Sanskrit root di, to fly, and commentators on the tantras were repeating that derivation by the eighth century. Whether they were right is still argued. Where the word travelled is not in doubt. It comes down into Hindi as dain and into a scatter of related north Indian words, every one of which means witch, and that was already one of its senses in the medieval period. Before she was anything luminous she was a woman who flew and ate people.

The Shaiva tantras keep her in the worst company they have. The Brahmayamala lists her among the dangerous varieties of female spirit and holds that her condition is reached by viloma methods, practices run deliberately against the grain. Her close relative the shakini gets a definition that the Kashmiri commentator Kshemaraja preserved out of the Tantrasadbhava: a woman who draws living creatures near by trickery, drinks their fluids so that she can change her shape, then kills them, and who is happiest in dreadful places. The Siddhayogeshvarimata takes a simpler precaution and forbids anyone to say the word aloud.

By the seventh century there were whole scriptures named for her. The philosopher Dharmakirti mentions Dakinitantras in order to disapprove of them, and his disapproval is the only reason anyone knows they existed. Not one line of them survives.

The Puranas keep her in crowds and rarely give her a name. She marches on Daksha’s sacrifice in the Shiva Purana among the retinue of Virabhadra and Mahakali, packed in with the bhutas, the guhyakas and the kshetrapalas. Parashurama sees dakinis among Shiva’s attendants on Kailash. In the Bhagavata Purana the cowherd women of Vrindavan have just watched the infant Krishna kill the demoness Putana, and they do what any sensible household would do afterwards. They perform the protective rites over him, and then they stand and recite aloud the entire catalogue of things that might come for the child next. The dakinis are named first on the list.

Eleventh-century Kashmir gives the sharpest picture. In the Kathasaritsagara the word works as an insult and a diagnosis at once. Yoginis in those tales can be splendid, useful, even kind; the ones the storyteller calls dakini or shakini never are. Kalaratri keeps house for a respectable brahmin teacher whose whole profession is the correct performance of ritual. She is grotesque, she is greedy, she flies by means of mantras and human flesh, and she is secretly the teacher of a coven. In another tale a tired traveller accepts a woman’s hospitality, is offered enchanted barley, and comes close to leaving her house as a goat.

Buddhism did not argue her out of existence. It ate her. A commentary by the Tang monk Yi Xing on the Mahavairocana Tantra tells how the buddha Vairocana, wanting the dakinis to stop preying on people, took the form of the black god Mahakala, smeared his body with ash, stood in a desolate place and summoned every one of them. They came, since they could fly and walk on water and go more or less anywhere. He told them that as they alone were forever devouring people, he would now devour them. Then he swallowed them all and would not let them die.

What followed was a negotiation. Released and forbidden flesh, they asked the obvious question: what were they supposed to live on. The concession was the hearts of the dead. They objected that the great yakshas always reached a dying man first, so he taught them a mantra that would tell them six months in advance when a person’s life was going to end, on condition that they guard that person until the time came. The bargain held. It is how a race of predators was walked, one clause at a time, onto the Buddhist path.

The bargain travelled. Carried into Japan with esoteric Buddhism in the ninth century, the dakinis sit in the Womb Realm mandala in the court of Yama, half naked on round mats beside a human corpse, one of them eating an arm and a leg while two others hold skulls. By the twelfth century the plural had collapsed into a single goddess, Dakiniten, who acquired a fox, and through the fox acquired the rice deity Inari, and through Inari acquired a shrine network that covered the country. Her rite had a reputation for working and a matching reputation for being the sort of thing a careful man kept clear of. Taira no Kiyomori is said to have shot at a fox during a hunt, found himself facing a woman who offered him anything he wanted in exchange for her life, recognised what she was, and spared her. He got his power. The story is careful to add that he knew it would not pass to his children.

Tibet did something stranger than converting her. It renamed her. The Tibetan mkha’ ‘gro ma, khandroma, means sky-goer, and it most likely translates not dakini at all but khechara, a different Sanskrit word taken out of the Chakrasamvara Tantra. The substitution took, so thoroughly that the sky-going sense is now the first thing most readers meet. The sky is emptiness, and a being who moves through it without obstruction became the female form of enlightened mind rather than a hazard on the road. Whole bodies of teaching are held to have been hidden by her and for her, sealed in rock and lake and mind as terma, written on yellow scrolls in a symbolic dakini script that nobody but the intended finder can read.

The encounter everyone repeats belongs to Naropa. He was a Bengali scholar who took the gatekeeper’s chair at Nalanda in 1049 and held it for eight years, and one afternoon a shadow fell across the book he was reading. An old woman stood there, hideous, and asked whether he understood the words of his texts or their sense. The words, he said, and she was delighted. Then he added that he understood the sense as well. She threw down her stick and began to weep. She had been happy, she told him, because the first answer was true, and she was weeping because the second was a lie. He left the monastery to go looking for a teacher called Tilopa, and did not stop looking until he had nothing left to be proud of. The account is not a contemporary record. It reaches modern readers through a Tibetan life of Naropa translated by Herbert Guenther in 1963, and the reference works cannot agree when that life was composed; the man named as its author, Lhatsun Rinchen Namgyal of Drakar Taso, is usually dated 1473 to 1557, some four centuries after the afternoon he describes.

Painters settled her appearance late, and settled it on one figure. Vajrayogini, the supreme wisdom dakini, holds the pose in eighteenth-century Tibetan thangkas: red, naked, one face and two hands, her chin tipped up to a skullcup lifted above her mouth, a curved flaying knife with a gold vajra handle in the other hand, a skull-topped khatvanga staff resting along her shoulder. Bone tiara, bone girdle, bone bracelets, a necklace of dry skulls, a dark green scarf lifting around her arms. She stands on the red goddess Kalaratri and on black Bhairava, above a sun disc and a many-coloured lotus, inside a standing sheet of flame. Other forms give her three eyes and a garland of fifty fresh heads. The dryness of the skulls is worth noticing. Those are old kills.

What she does is mostly a matter of crossing lines that are supposed to hold. She flies. She changes shape, and in the older material the shape-changing is paid for with somebody’s blood. She knows when a person will die, and in the Japanese bargain that knowledge is her wage. She carries teachings no living master holds and hands them over, or declines to, on a schedule of her own, and in the Shaiva reckoning an encounter with her class of goddess is the entire object of the ritual system, the thing that turns a practitioner from livestock into something with a will.

Her limits are the limits of a bargain. Every tradition that has kept her has first had to put her down: swallowed by Vairocana wearing Mahakala’s body, tamed in other texts by Vajrapani, held off by Acala in Japanese rites for lengthening a life. What she gives is conditional, and the condition is recognition. Naropa’s failure was not ignorance of the texts. It was that he did not know what was standing in front of him. Read her wrongly and she stops being a teacher and reverts to the older thing, the one from the burning ground. She had been eating people for centuries before anyone thought to call her wisdom, and the sources never quite let that go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a dakini?

A dakini is a class of female spirit in Indian, Tibetan and East Asian religion, originally a flying, flesh-eating being of the cremation grounds. In Hindu and early Buddhist sources she is a predator who takes the flesh or vital fluids of the living, while in Tibetan Buddhism she is reinterpreted as a “sky-goer” who embodies enlightened wisdom and guards secret teachings.

What does the word dakini mean?

Tantric commentators derived dakini from the Sanskrit root di, “to fly”, and that derivation was in circulation by the eighth century, though its correctness is still debated. The word survives in Hindi as dain and in related north Indian words meaning “witch”, which was one of its medieval senses. The Tibetan name khandroma, “sky-goer”, is probably a rendering of a different Sanskrit word, khechara, rather than a translation of dakini itself.

Are dakinis good or evil?

Both, depending on the tradition and the century. The dakinis of the Puranas, the Shaiva tantras and the Kathasaritsagara are dangerous witches, and in Japan they were tamed only by being swallowed by the buddha Vairocana in the form of Mahakala; the Tibetan wisdom dakini is a guide and a giver of teachings whose help is essential to the highest stages of practice.

What is the story of Naropa and the dakini?

An old and hideous woman appeared to Naropa, then gatekeeper at the monastery of Nalanda, and asked whether he understood the words of his texts or their sense. He said the words, which pleased her, then claimed to understand the sense as well, at which she wept and told him he had lied. He abandoned the monastery to search for the teacher Tilopa, and the account survives only in a Tibetan biography written centuries after his death.

What does a dakini look like?

There is no single form. In the Japanese Womb Realm mandala dakinis are half-naked women seated on round mats beside a corpse, one eating a human arm and a leg while others hold skull cups. Tibetan painting instead standardises the supreme wisdom dakini, Vajrayogini, as a red naked figure drinking from a skullcup with her face turned upward, holding a curved flaying knife, a skull-topped staff on her shoulder and a ring of flame around her.

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