Yakshi

The woman on the east gateway at Sanchi has been reaching for the same branch for roughly two thousand years. She hangs out from the bracket at an angle no living body could hold, one arm hooked over a fruit-laden bough, one leg wrapped around the trunk, the whole weight of a stone architrave resting on her hip. The sandstone holds the afternoon heat. Her anklets are carved deep enough to catch shadow. She is not decoration and she is not a saint, and the Buddhist monument she supports was built long after people had already been leaving offerings to her kind at the roots of actual trees.

Yakshis are the women of a very old class of spirits, the female counterparts of the yakshas, and they belong to places rather than to pantheons. Trees first, then mountains, rock mounds, rivers, tanks and the sea. They predate the organised religions that later absorbed them, and Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism each took them in on their own terms without ever quite domesticating them. What they hold jurisdiction over is abundance: sap, rainfall, harvest, children, and the buried hoards that abundance turns into. Robert DeCaroli places them in a genuinely awkward slot in the Indian spirit world, hovering between the hungry dead and the gods and sharing something of both natures, which is exactly why they are so difficult to file and so useful at a doorway.

The pose is the giveaway. She stands in tribhanga, the triple bend at neck, waist and knee that throws the hips out and the shoulders back, one hand grasping a branch of sala or ashoka and drawing it down, one foot set against the trunk. Sculptors called this shalabhanjika, the breaking of the sala branch, and the gesture carries an old belief with it: that a tree flowers because a woman wants it to, that longing itself is fertile and can be transmitted through the skin of the bark. The doctrine has a name, dohada, and it is usually explained through the cravings of a pregnant woman. A yakshi at a gateway is therefore doing two jobs at once, promising fruitfulness to everyone who passes beneath her and physically carrying the stone.

At Bharhut, where the railing pillars survive with their labels intact, some of them have names. An inscription identifies Chulakoka Devata, who stands on an elephant beneath an ashoka in the branch-grasping attitude, and another names Sudarshana, riding a makara. This matters more than it sounds. These are not generic ornaments but individual local goddesses, each with her own patch of ground and her own devotees, gathered onto a Buddhist monument the way a new administration keeps the old district officers on the payroll. Pilgrims coming through the south gate at first light would have passed them at eye level, close enough to touch, and many of them almost certainly did.

The most famous of all of them is not attached to any gateway. In 1917 villagers found a life-sized female figure in the Ganges bank near Didarganj, outside Patna, and pulled her out of the silt. She stands about five feet two, cut from Chunar sandstone, holding a flywhisk in her raised right hand, her lower garment falling in fine incised folds, and her surface carries the extraordinary mirror polish associated with the Mauryan workshops. Two thousand years underground did not dull it. Whether she is third century BCE or several centuries later is still argued over, since a second, unpolished figure of the same type muddies the dating, but nobody disputes what she is. She is a yakshi, and she has been the face of early Indian sculpture ever since.

Jainism gave her a job title. Every one of the twenty-four tirthankaras was assigned a yaksha and a yakshi as attendant guardians of the doctrine, shasanadevatas, and by roughly the eighth or ninth century the list of pairs had settled into fixed form. Three of the yakshis outgrew their assignments entirely. Ambika, attendant of Neminatha, Padmavati, attendant of Parshvanatha, and Chakreshvari, attendant of Rishabhanatha, receive devotional worship in their own right, with their own temples and their own petitioners, which is a peculiar outcome for beings whose original function was to stand behind somebody else.

Then there is the other tradition, and it is much less friendly. The Buddhist Jataka tales are full of yakkhinis who work the roads. In the Telapatta Jataka the traveller is warned about them before he sets out: they raise illusory mansions in the middle of the forest, dress themselves in celestial ornaments, and call men in for water and rest. They take the eye with beauty, the ear with singing, the nose with perfume, the tongue with food and the body with soft red cushions. Then they have their way with the men, and kill them, and eat them while the blood is still running. Gail Sutherland notes the pattern plainly: where the male yaksha’s appetite is simply an appetite, the yakshi’s is sexual and alimentary at once, and the tales cannot separate the two.

Medieval Kerala refined this into something close to a genre. The traveller is a Namboothiri Brahmin walking a deserted path at night, on his way to a temple performance or an assignation. A beautiful woman is standing by the road. She is chewing betel and has no lime for it, and asks whether he might have a little. He does, and he gives it to her, because the giving of chewing materials between a man and a woman means what it means in South India, and she invites him home. Her house is nearby and it is very fine. Inside it, the woman becomes the yakshi and the house becomes a tree. She eats him. In the morning the next traveller finds the hair and the teeth at the roots and takes the lesson.

Her powers all run from the same root. She commands maya, the illusion that builds mansions out of nothing and a lovely face out of a set of fangs, and she can shift shape at will. She quickens trees, grants children and points the way to treasure. Her feet, in some tellings, never quite touch the ground, though the anklets can still be heard. Her limits run from that same root, because a yakshi is bound to her tree and cannot leave it far behind. In the Kerala tales a mantravadi, a sorcerer, defeats her by driving an iron nail into a kanjiram tree and pinning her inside it, and there she stays until some fool pulls the nail out. Often she negotiates instead. She asks for a place in the outer courtyard of a nearby temple, and she gets it, and the road becomes safe again because the thing that haunted it has been given somewhere to be worshipped. That bargain is the oldest thing about her. It is what the stupa builders at Sanchi and Bharhut had already done, in stone, at the gate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Yakshi?

A yakshi, also called a yakshini, is a female nature spirit in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain tradition, the feminine counterpart of the yaksha. Yakshis inhabit trees, hills, rivers, pools and forests, and they govern fertility, plant life and hidden wealth. They are older than the organised religions that absorbed them, and they were worshipped at actual trees before they were carved onto temple and stupa gateways.

Why is the Yakshi always shown holding a tree branch?

The pose is called shalabhanjika, meaning the breaking of the sala branch, and it shows the yakshi with one foot against a trunk and one hand pulling down a flowering bough. It expresses dohada, the belief that a tree blossoms in response to a woman’s touch or longing. Placed on a gateway, the yakshi both promises fertility to those passing beneath her and physically supports the structure.

Is the Yakshi good or evil?

Both, depending on the tradition and the encounter. In sculpture and in Jain worship she is auspicious and protective, a guardian of doctrine and a giver of children and prosperity, with figures like Ambika and Padmavati receiving devotion in their own right. In the Buddhist Jataka tales and in the folklore of medieval Kerala she is a road-haunting predator who lures lone male travellers into an illusory house and eats them.

How does the Kerala Yakshi kill her victims?

She waits on a deserted path at night in the form of a beautiful woman and asks a passing traveller, usually a Namboothiri Brahmin, for a little lime for her betel leaf. When he obliges she invites him to her nearby home, which is an illusion cast over a tree. There she takes her true form and devours him, leaving his hair and teeth beneath the tree to be found in the morning.

How can a Yakshi be stopped?

In the Kerala tales a mantravadi, or sorcerer, binds her by driving an iron nail into a kanjiram tree, trapping her inside it, though she escapes if anyone removes the nail. Many stories end with negotiation rather than defeat: the yakshi asks to be installed in the outer courtyard of a temple and worshipped there, and the road becomes safe once she has a place of her own.

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