Yogini vs Dakini: Female Tantric Deities

A yogini is, depending on context, a woman who practises yoga or Tantra, a class of fierce semi-divine female beings in Shaiva and Kaula Tantra, or one of the sixty-four yoginis worshipped in medieval circular temples. A dakini in Hindu Tantra is a comparable cremation-ground being — but in Buddhist Vajrayana the same word means something different and far more central.

These two words are the most frequently confused terms in writing about female tantric deities, partly because both traditions used them, partly because modern neo-Tantra has borrowed them for purposes neither tradition would recognise. This guide separates the senses: what yogini meant in the Kaula sources, why no two lists of the sixty-four agree, what the Hindu dakini is and where the strange series dakini–rakini–lakini–kakini–shakini–hakini comes from, what a Vajrayana dakini is, and what the sources do and do not tell us about real women. For the temples themselves, see our guide to the 64 Yogini temples.

What Does Yogini Mean?

Yogini (योगिनी) is simply the feminine of yogi, and in tantric literature it does at least three jobs at once.

The third sense is the one that makes the yogini cult distinctive. Kaula texts speak of teaching passed on through the "mouth of the yogini" (yoginivaktra), and they treat the encounter between practitioner and yogini — divine, human, or deliberately left ambiguous — as the point at which the tradition is actually transmitted. That is a strikingly different model of authority from the father-to-son or guru-to-disciple textual transmission of Brahmanical learning.

The Yogini Cults in Kaula Tantra

The yoginis emerge into clear historical view in the Shaiva tantras of what Alexis Sanderson classified as the Vidyapitha — texts such as the Brahmayamala and the Siddhayogeshvarimata, which Shaman Hatley and Judit Törzsök respectively have edited and studied. These are cremation-ground scriptures. Their rites are fierce, their offerings impure, their deities female and dangerous, and their central goal is melaka or melapa: the meeting with yoginis, in which the practitioner who has satisfied them receives power, knowledge and admission to their company.

Out of this stratum the Kaula systems developed, keeping the vocabulary of clans (kula) and yoginis while moving the emphasis toward interiorised practice, aesthetic theology and eventually household respectability. The fully domesticated end of that process is Sri Vidya; the transgressive end is the material discussed on our page on vama marga. Our overview of the three tantric traditions maps the whole spectrum, and the origins page covers the chronology.

The yogini cult left the most spectacular architecture Tantra ever produced: circular, roofless temples with yogini images set in niches around the inner wall, built between roughly the ninth and twelfth centuries and concentrated in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. Vidya Dehejia's 1986 survey remains the standard study, and our page on the surviving yogini temples covers the sites individually.

The 64 Yoginis: Why the Lists Differ

Sixty-four is the number that stuck, and it is usually explained as the eight Matrikas multiplied by eight. But the tradition never fixed a canon. Surviving temples and texts give forty-two, sixty-four and eighty-one figures; inscribed labels at sites such as Bheraghat name yoginis whose names appear nowhere else; and regional lists overlap only partially. Dehejia's work of collating the known lists found agreement on a minority of names and wide divergence beyond that.

This matters practically, because "the 64 yoginis names" is a popular search and the lists circulating online are often assembled from incompatible sources, padded out, or invented. We do not publish a complete list of sixty-four here, because there is no single list that the evidence supports. What can be said reliably is that the Matrika-derived names form the stable core of most lists:

Beyond this core, individual temples supply their own rosters — some names descriptive (goddesses of terrifying laughter, of the burning ground, of particular animals), some apparently local, many unattested elsewhere. Treating that variety as a defect is a mistake; the plurality is the point of a cult built around clans of goddesses rather than a single canonical pantheon.

Dakinis in Hindu Tantra

In Sanskrit Hindu sources, a dakini (डाकिनी) is typically a fierce female being of the cremation ground: an attendant in the retinue of Kali or Chamunda, associated with flesh and blood, feared rather than courted. Dakinis appear alongside other classes with rhyming names — shakini, lakini, kakini, hakini, rakini — and in Puranic and later literature the whole group shades toward the category of the dangerous supernatural female. In Bengali and several other North Indian languages, dakini and shakini eventually became ordinary words for "witch", which is one reason the Hindu sense of the term feels so different from the Buddhist one.

The series has one important technical use. The Shatchakranirupana, the sixteenth-century Bengali text on the six chakras that John Woodroffe translated in The Serpent Power (1919) and which shaped nearly every modern account of the subtle body, assigns one goddess of this series to each chakra.

These are visualised as presiding deities of the centres, each with her own colour, number of arms and attributes, and each associated with one of the bodily constituents. Popular chakra literature usually drops them, because they do not fit the therapeutic framing that modern chakra writing prefers; they are, however, part of the original text.

Dakinis in Buddhist Vajrayana

Buddhist Tantra took the same Sanskrit word and made it a positive and structurally central category. The Tibetan translation, khandroma, means "sky-goer" or "she who moves through space" — space here carrying the doctrinal sense of emptiness, so that the dakini is the figure who moves freely in the open dimension of reality.

Tibetan sources distinguish levels. Worldly dakinis are powerful but unenlightened beings. Wisdom dakinis (jnana-dakini) are enlightened, and the term then covers a range of roles: a meditational deity in her own right, the feminine aspect of the guru's realisation, a protector of teachings, and the source of the symbolic transmissions that the Nyingma terma tradition describes as recorded in "dakini script". A practitioner may also speak of a dakini appearing at a crucial moment in the form of an ordinary woman.

Vajrayogini and her closely related form Vajravarahi are the best-known examples: not attendants but principal meditational deities (yidam) of the highest class of tantras, practised as a main deity by many lineages. Miranda Shaw's Buddhist Goddesses of India surveys the whole female pantheon; our Buddhist Tantra page covers Vajrayana more generally, and the deity Chhinnamasta offers a striking Hindu parallel to the Buddhist Chinnamunda Vajrayogini, discussed on our page on the severed-headed goddess.

Yogini vs Dakini: A Comparison

Two cautions follow from the table. First, the Hindu and Buddhist dakinis are not the same figure with a different accent; they share a word and a general fierceness, and diverge in almost everything else. Second, yogini and dakini are not simply Hindu and Buddhist equivalents either: Buddhist tantras also use yogini — the highest class of tantras is called the Yogini Tantras — and the two vocabularies overlapped in the same regions of eastern India during the same centuries, which is exactly why the words travelled.

Were There Real Women in These Traditions?

This is the honest hard question, and it deserves to be answered without inflation in either direction. The surviving tantric literature was, with very few exceptions, written by men, preserved by men and addressed to male practitioners. Women appear in it constantly, but in roles the texts define: as the goddesses themselves, as clan-women whose presence makes a rite effective, as ritual consorts (duti), and — less often but unmistakably — as teachers.

There is real material on the positive side. Kaula texts repeatedly enjoin respect for women and forbid disparaging them; the Kularnava Tantra is explicit on the point. The image of transmission through the "mouth of the yogini" places a female figure at the origin of the teaching. On the Buddhist side, named women are securely attested: Yeshe Tsogyal in the Tibetan imperial period, Machig Labdron as the founder of the Chöd tradition, Niguma and Sukhasiddhi as sources of major Kagyu transmissions, and female mahasiddhas such as Lakshminkara and the sisters Mekhala and Kanakhala in the Indian siddha literature.

Miranda Shaw, in Passionate Enlightenment (Princeton, 1994), argued from these materials that women were creative participants, authors and teachers in Indian tantric Buddhism rather than instruments of male practice — a deliberately revisionist reading of texts that had usually been interpreted the other way. Her book has been influential and it is contested. Critics have argued that she reads the sources more optimistically than their language supports, that some attributions of authorship are uncertain, and that a symbolic exaltation of the feminine is fully compatible with the subordination of actual women. David Gordon White, in Kiss of the Yogini (Chicago, 2003), takes close to the opposite view of the Hindu yogini cult, reading it as organised around male practitioners' acquisition of power through contact with yoginis and their sexual fluids — a reading in which the women's own agency is largely beside the point.

The responsible summary is that the sources permit both readings, that neither has won, and that the historical truth was probably uneven across lineages, regions and centuries. What is not in doubt is that female teachers existed, that Tantra granted women a ritual standing unusual in its milieu, and that later tradition produced acknowledged women gurus — our page on notable tantric masters includes some of them.

Dakini in Modern Neo-Tantra and Pop Culture

Since the late twentieth century "dakini" has had a second career in the West, largely disconnected from either tradition. In neo-tantric workshop culture it tends to mean a wild, sexually liberated archetype of the feminine, used as a personal title, a workshop role or a brand name; "yogini" is used similarly, often just as a marketing word for a woman who does yoga. Meanwhile the word has been absorbed by video games, anime and fantasy fiction as a name for a supernatural female character with no particular doctrinal content.

None of this is illegitimate as language change, but it should not be mistaken for information about Tantra. A Vajrayana dakini is a category within a formal system of deity practice that requires empowerment and long training; a Kaula yogini belongs to a specific medieval ritual world with its own clans, mantras and obligations. Our page on tantric myths and reality traces how this kind of borrowing happened, and our guide to learning Tantra authentically suggests how to tell the two apart when assessing a teacher or a course.