WISDOM DAKINIS--
PASSIONATE AND WRATHFUL
By John Myrdhin Reynolds
Dakinis
– Energy and Wisdom
In general, the Buddhist term “Dakini” can be taken to mean goddess.
In the Tibetan language this Sanskrit term is translated as Khandroma (mkha’-‘gro-ma)
meaning “she who traverses the sky” or “she who moves in space.” Dakinis
are active manifestations of energy. Therefore, they are usually depicted as
dancing, this also indicating that they actively participate in the world, or in
the spiritual perspective, in both Samsara and Nirvana. In the Tantric Buddhist
tradition of Tibet, Dakinis basically represent manifestations of energy in
female form, the movement of energy in space. In this context, the sky or space
indicates Shunyata, the insubstantiality of all phenomena, which is, at the same
time, the pure potentiality for all possible manifestations. And the movements
of their dance signify the movements of thoughts and the energy spontaneously
emerging from the nature of mind. Being linked to energy in all its functions,
the Dakinis are much associated with the revelation of the Anuttara Tantras or
Higher Tantras, which represent the path of transformation. What is transformed
here is energy. This method is quite reminiscent of alchemy, the transmutation
of base metal into pure precious gold. In this case, the energy of the negative
emotions or kleshas, called poisons, are transformed into the luminous energy of
enlightened awareness or gnosis (jnana).
These energies may be of a transcendent and spiritual in nature, in which
case they are called Jnana Dakinis (ye-shes kyi mkha’-‘gro-ma) or wisdom
goddesses. Here “wisdom” or gnosis (jnana, ye-shes) means spiritual
knowledge. Wisdom Dakinis are feminine manifestations of Buddha enlightenment
and as such they transcend the conditioned existence of Samsara. Or they may be
of a worldly nature, in which case one speaks of Karma Dakinis (las kyi
mkha’-‘gro-ma) or action goddesses. As such they still belong to Samsara and
are not enlightened beings. These Dakinis live and move in the dimension of
energy of the earth. Some of these worldly Dakinis, who were once local pagan
goddesses and nature spirits, were subdued and converted in the past and now
serve as Guardians of the Buddhist teachings. Thus, there are basically two
kinds of Dakinis. The corresponding manifestation of energy in a male form is
called a Daka (mkha’-‘gro). The term Khandro, or more properly Khandroma, is
also applied, especially in Eastern Tibet, to a woman Lama or spiritual teacher,
and even to the wife or daughter of a Lama, as an honorific title much like
“Lady.” The designation Dakini is also found in Hindu tradition, but here it
is applied only to very minor goddesses, resembling more what we would call
witches in our Western tradition. They appear as wild female spirits in the
retinue accompanying the great goddess Durga.
In the early middle ages, Hindu theologians and philosophers came to
speak of the goddesses as shaktis, that is, as the personified energy of their
male divine consorts. However, in the Buddhist tradition, the term has a much
wider and more important usage. The Dakini, as a manifestation of enlightened
awareness, represents wisdom (prajna) and not just energy (shakti). Wisdom (prajna)
is that higher intellectual faculty of mind that penetrates into the nature of
reality, distinguishing what is true from what is false, and so on. We find here
a phenomenon similar to the personification of wisdom as a female figure in the
western tradition, as Hochmah or Sophia. Moreover, this wisdom is not a young
maiden who is sweet, sentimental, and passive. Rather, a Dakini is an active
manifestation of enlightenment. She is a manifestation of energy, although
Buddhist texts do not use the term shakti.
Moreover, the Dakini is a manifestation of the energy of enlightened
awareness in the stream of consciousness of the individual male practitioner,
which awakens that consciousness to the spiritual path, thus playing the role of
the archetypal figure the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung designated as the Anima.
The Anima represents the unconscious female side of the male personality. In a
female stream of consciousness, the Animus or Daka is the figure that plays the
corresponding role. These male counterparts are called Dakas and are usually
depicted as Tantric yogis with long matted hair, naked or attired in animal
skins, wearing ornaments of human bone, and dwelling in cemeteries and cremation
grounds. At certain places of pilgrimage and in cremation grounds, the Dakas and
Dakinis will gather at certain phases of the moon in order to celebrate the
Tantric feast called the Ganachakra Puja. These nocturnal rites under the moon
are reminiscent of the Bacchanalia or the Witches’ Sabbat in the West. The
Dakas and Dakinis come to the feast, flying through the sky, and gather around
the huge cauldron made from a gigantic skull, where they sing and dance and
drink. But because it has been mostly men who have written books and accounts of
their meditation experiences throughout Tibetan history, the emphasis has been
on Dakinis, rather than Dakas.
According to the system of the Buddhist Tantras, the practitioner goes to
refuge not only in the Three Jewels (dkon-mchog gsum) of the Buddha, the Dharma,
and the Sangha, but to refuge in the Three Roots (rtsa-ba gsum) of the Guru, the
Deity, and the Dakini. In terms of meditation practices relating to these Three
Roots, it is said the Guru or spiritual master grants to the practitioner the
blessings or spiritual energy of inspiration and enlightenment. The Devatas or
Meditation Deities grant siddhis or psychic and spiritual powers and the Dakinis
grant karma-siddhis or magical powers that are of a more worldly purpose.
In general, the Buddhist Tantras are divided into four classes of texts
and their corresponding practices. In the three Lower Tantras known as the Kriya
Tantra, the Charya Tantra, and the Yoga Tantra, the Buddha images and divine
forms generally belong to the sunny daylight side of consciousness. These Buddha
figures are all peaceful, smiling, fashionably well-dressed, and sitting in the
sky radiating light, like the sun itself on a clear sunny day. Indeed, the
compassion of the Buddha is often compared to the rays of the sun, which falls
upon everyone equally, the sinner and the righteous alike. These celestial
hierarchies of radiant Buddha figures and choirs of great Bodhisattvas filling
the heavens may be compared to similar celestial beatific visions in the
monotheistic religions. For an example of such a poetic celestial vision, one
only has to read Dante’s Paradiso. But human existence and
consciousness is not always sunny and spiritual, attired in white robes and
filled to overflowing with sweetness and light. There is also the dark side.
This twilight side or dark side of human consciousness is addressed in
the fourth class or Higher Tantra, known as Anuttara Tantra. Although the
archetypal figures, the Goddess and the Devil, have been expelled and banned
from heaven by the monotheistic religions, a heaven we conventionally consider
to be an entirely spiritual dimension, they reappear as darkly luminous figures
in the Higher Tantras. At certain times, the Dakinis, riding through the sky on
the backs of wild animals and led by their queen, gather in the cemetery or
cremation ground on the mountain and dance naked around their bubbling cauldron.
The predominant symbolism here is lunar rather than solar; it is nighttime
rather than daytime. The symbolism is chthonic, belonging to the earth and the
underworld, rather than celestial and belonging to heaven. In general, the
iconography of the Anuttara Tantras is characterized by the presence of these
witches or Dakinis and by these demonic wrathful deities. In the Lower Tantras,
wrathful deities occasionally appear, but they play a secondary and subservient
role as body-guards and doorkeepers. However, in the Anuttara Tantras these
banned figures come to step forward and stand in the center of the Mandala.
These two suppressed archetypal figures, the Goddess and the Devil, re-emerge
from the shadows of consciousness and are re-admitted into the light of heaven,
which is our daytime consciousness.
But the ascension to heaven of the Goddess and these Wrathful Deities was
part of a historical process that reflected the social and political conditions
that appeared in Northern India the thousand years after the time of the
appearance of the historical Buddha. According to Edward Conze, the evolution of
Mahayana Buddhism was in part stimulated by the movement of Buddhism before the
time of Christ into the south of India inhabited by Dravidian peoples.
Dravidian-speaking South India was precisely the area where the Prajnaparamita
Sutra tradition of Mahayana Buddhism developed and where wisdom first became
personified as the Great Goddess. Indeed, even today, each village in the south
of India has its own Amma or local Mother Goddess.
And according to Etienne Lamotte, the other core region for the
development of Mahayana Buddhism was the northwest, in what is today Pakistan
and Afghanistan, were the original Indian Buddhism came into an interface with
Iranian culture, and even with the Greeks in Gandhara and Bactria. It was Greek
Buddhists in Afghanistan who, before the time of Christ, produced the first
images of the Buddha, based on the icon of the Greek god Apollo. Figures of
Iranian inspiration also appeared in Mahayana scriptures and art, such as the
future Buddha Maitreya, who is based on the Iranian savior god Mithra, and the
Buddha Amitabha in his western paradise of Sukhavati, who appears to be similar
to the Iranian high god Ahura Mazda. According to the Chinese pilgrims who
visited India in 5th-7th centuries, the Buddhist
monasteries in north-central India were still largely Hinayana in outlook.
Mahayana was strongest on the periphery, in the south and in the northwest.
This was equally true for the development of the Tantras a thousand years
after the historical Buddha. According to Tibetan historians, such as Taranatha
(b. 1575) and Pema Karpo (b. 1527), the Anuttara Tantras originated not in
north-central India, the original field of activity of the historical Buddha,
but to the northwest in the mysterious land of Uddiyana. G. Tucci, basing
himself on two medieval Tibetan accounts written long after the historical
Uddiyana had vanished in the Muslim invasions of India and Afghanistan, believed
that Uddiyana was the small Swat valley in modern day Pakistan. But there is
ample evidence to show that Uddiyana was a much larger region including a goodly
portion of Eastern Afghanistan. According to Tibetan historians, the Buddha
visited Uddiyana at the invitation of its king Indrabhuti and in response to the
king’s request for a spiritual path that did not require him to renounce the
world and his kingship in order to become a monk, the Buddha taught the Guhyasamaja
Tantra, the Tantra of the Secret Assembly. This is one of the central
Tantras in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition according to both the Old and the New
Schools and some Western scholars generally regard the Guhyasamaja as the
earliest of the Anuttara Tantras. Alex Wayman would even place it as early as
the 4th century of our era. It is said that king Indrabhuti and his
court practiced the methods of this Tantra and that the people of the country
attained enlightenment in such numbers that the country nearly became
depopulated.
Even today among the Tibetans, Uddiyana remains the legendary Land of the
Dakinis, that is, a land of exceptionally beautiful and independent women. In
the early medieval times, many of the Mahasiddhas or great adepts, who were
largely responsible for the revelation of the Buddhist Tantras, were said to
have personally visited Uddiyana in order to receive initiation into the
practice of the Tantras from the Dakinis. This included famous names such as
Nagarjuna the alchemist (the reincarnation of the earlier philosopher Nagarjuna),
Saraha, Tilopa, and others. It was said that Nagarjuna recovered from a stupa
beside the Danakosha lake the original text of the Tantras written down by
Indrabhuti himself. The texts of the Tantras had been guarded and preserved
there by the Nagas, the serpentine spirits of water who dwelled in the lake. He
returned with these texts to India and transmitted the Higher Tantric teachings
to the Brahman Saraha and other Mahasiddhas. Moreover, it appears that these
Dakinis in Uddiyana were not just goddesses or symbols, but actual flesh and
blood women practitioners of the Tantras. [5] The names of some of them survive,
such as the princess Lakshimkara, the sister of king Indrabhuti, because they
wrote texts that have survived. Otherwise, most of these women Tantrikas remain
veiled in myth and legend.
Beside the Dakini, the other striking figure in these Higher Tantras is
the Krodha or wrathful deity. In the earlier Mahayana Sutras and the texts of
the Lower Tantras we find only the peaceful beatific visions of the Buddhas in
the celestial mandala palace. How was it that the religion of a peaceful
non-violent order of monks and mendicants gave rise to these visions of
terrifying wrathful deities, which would be considered demons and devils by most
Westerners? The monastic Sangha always depended on outside patronage because the
monks themselves had renounced the world and did not engage in commerce or
productive labor. Historically speaking, the earliest source of large-scale
patronage for the Buddhist Sangha was the Indian merchant class. This began in
the time of the historical Buddha himself when certain donations of land were
made for places of residence for the monks during the rainy season retreat.
Within a few hundred years these hermitages grew into large monastic
universities with thousands of monks. With the Emperor Ashoka, the Buddhist
monastic community came to experience royal patronage. This royal patronage by
kings and princes continued off and on until the collapse of the Pala dynasty
and the destruction of the Buddhist monasteries in Northern India in the 13th
century by the invading Muslim armies. But much earlier, the kings in the
northwest who patronized Buddhism experienced invasions by Scythians, Huns,
Turks, and Iranian speaking peoples, as well as by the Arabs in Sindh province.
The invading Muslins from the West had no respect for indigenous Indian
religious culture, considering it mere idolatry, and, moreover, the Muslims
possessed a proselytizing religion of their own that they sought to impose upon
those peoples they conquered. Both Hindus and Buddhists suffered grievously in
these invasions. At first the foreign invaders adopted the native religions,
both Buddhism and Shaivism. Around the time of Christ, Buddhism and Shaivism
were keen rivals in Afghanistan and the Buddhists frankly modeled their
principal wrathful meditation deity called Heruka on Bhairava, the wrathful form
of Shiva.
Therefore, in the Buddhist meditation practices offered to these princes,
or even more likely, actually developed by them, the body-guards and the
doorkeepers figures such as the Bodhisattvas Vajrapani, Hayagriva, and Yamantaka,
came in from the periphery and occupied the center of the mandala as the
wrathful manifestations of Buddha enlightenment. To a besieged aristocracy on
the frontiers of Indian civilization, there wrathful deities, who have the power
to overcome, subdue, and destroy enemies, whether evil spirits or foreign
invaders, had a certain appeal. In the Greek art of Gandhara before the time of
Christ, Vajrapani, the personal body-guard of the Buddha, appeared in the guise
of a very human Heracles with his club. But five hundred years after Christ,
Vajrapani and the other Krodharajas appear in almost demonic form—dark blue in
color like storm clouds, baring their fangs, with flame-like reddish or blond
hair, garlanded with serpents and necklaces of human skulls. At the same time
the northwest of Greater India fell into chaos as army after army invaded from
the West.
But whether the central deity in the mandala palace is wrathful or
feminine or both wrathful and feminine, as is the case with the Dakini
Simhamukha, this terrifying figure is a manifestation of the enlightened
awareness and compassion of the Buddha. Even a terrifying wrathful deity, such
as a Krodharaja, is the expression of the compassion of the Buddha in terms of
his skillful means. At certain times, it is necessary for the Buddha, although
all-loving and all-compassionate in himself, to show an angry and wrathful face,
just as a parent might have to show an angry face when disciplining a naughty
child. Otherwise, the willful child will ignore his mother’s or father’s
request. In the same way, the evil spirits and the invading barbarian armies
from the northwest were not impressed in early medieval times by the eloquence
and the peaceful non-violent manner of Buddhist monks. In the 12th
and 13th centuries, Muslim armies from the west invaded Northern
India and totally destroyed the flourishing monastic universities of
Nalanda, Vikrmashila, and Odantapuri. In the process, they massacred tens
of thousands of monks who did not resist the invaders. This slaughter was
justified because the saffron-robed monks were regarded as infidels and
idolaters. The temples were destroyed, the books burned, and the Buddha images
melted down for their gold. All that remained in the wake of these armies was
death and desolation from Uddiyana to Bengal. And Buddhism ceased to be a
functioning religious culture in the lands of the West. The Jains and the
Brahmans, however, were able to survive this onslaught because they did not
concentrate their clergy and intelligenzia in a few large monastic-universities.
They remained decentralized in the villages throughout Northern India and did
not usually become the targets for these marauding armies.
But that was history and conditions were different in Tibet when Buddhism
became established there in the 8th and 9th centuries.
Wrathful deities were just part of the Buddha Dharma imported from India and
therefore accepted. And moreover, the Tibetans, in their pre-Buddhist
shamanistic culture, had plenty of experience with evil spirits. The subduing
and exorcising and casting out of evil spirits were traditionally always a part
of the healing work of the shaman. The commentaries to the Tantras composed by
the Lamas, however, explain that it is because there is so much anger and hatred
and violence abroad in the world during this Kali Yuga, the Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas have created such a profusion of wrathful deities for meditation
practice. But in every case, the purpose is the same--
the transformation of the energy of the negative emotion of anger and
hatred, which breeds violence, chaos, and destruction into something positive,
into enlightened awareness, itself. This transformation is par excellence
the method of the Anuttara Tantras: the transformation or alchemical
transmutation of the energy of negative emotions (klesha) into positive
enlightened awareness (jnana). It was not that Buddhists ever worshipped demons,
but rather that the negative energy symbolized by these demons was transformed.
This is possible because energy and phenomena have no inherent existence, and
that is true also of the energy of our emotions. Phenomena and manifestations of
energy are empty (shunyata), so therefore the transforming of the negative into
the positive in always possible. This contrasts with the method enshrined in the
Sutras, that is to say, the renunciation of life in the world and avoidance of
the negative emotions or passions at all costs, like a man would seek to avoid
touching a poisonous plant.