Dakini Series 1: The Shakti They Got Wrong
This is the first in a series of articles on the Ḍākinī, drawn from our Dakini video series on the Siddha Tantra Arts YouTube channel. If you prefer to receive the teaching by watching rather than reading, the full video is embedded below. And if something in this piece shifts something in you, or raises a question, we would genuinely like to hear from you. Leave a comment at the bottom.
The Shakti
They Got Wrong
Something you have been told about feminine power is incomplete. And it has not just shaped what you think about a tradition or a deity. It has shaped what you believe is possible for you. What kind of knowledge you are allowed to receive. What kind of shakti you are allowed to carry. Whether truth needs to be softened before it reaches you.
This series is about a single word that exposes all of that.
Before going any further, try an experiment. Say the word, or simply read it slowly: Ḍākinī. Notice what arises. Fear, fascination, a mental image of something fierce and dark? A Buddhist sky-dancer in flowing robes? Confusion? Whatever came up is not a reaction to the Ḍākinī herself. It is information about which stream of incomplete knowledge you have been drinking from.
And almost everyone has been drinking from one of three streams.
The first stream is the broadest. Millions of people in the dharmic world, especially in India, grow up hearing "Dakini" the way they hear "bhuta" or "pishacha": as a category of afflicting entity. Something that drains vitality, causes illness, possesses. Their grandmothers warned them. Family purohits performed rituals to ward off Dakini dosha. This is not a tradition making things up. Real people have real experiences of affliction, and the word "Dakini" is attached to those experiences. The Siddha Dharma tradition actually explains why those experiences happen, and also why they represent only one corner of a much larger reality. We will come back to this.
The second stream is narrower but influential. These are the scholars, the people who read the original Sanskrit texts. And they have found something consistent: in the oldest surviving Shaiva scriptures, Dakinis appear almost exclusively as beings to be repelled. The mantras associated with them are counter-Dakini mantras. Even in advanced esoteric tantric texts, there are rules prohibiting the initiated practitioner from uttering the word "Dakini" at all. These scholars then trace what they call a "gradual incorporation," over centuries, Dakinis moving from being feared to being worshipped, and they present this as an evolution, as though human understanding slowly upgraded the Dakini. Real texts. Real evidence. And a reading of that evidence I will directly engage with later in this series.
The third stream flows largely through Vajrayana Buddhism, where Dakini is khandroma: sky-dancer, wisdom-being, the feminine principle of enlightened awareness. Beautiful, profound, and transplanted from its original soil into different ground, with the roots cut. The practitioners who had direct connection with Ḍākinī tantra continued their practices, but the garb changed, the narrative shifted. This is not unique to Buddhism. It has happened throughout history. Tribal tantra practices digested by larger religious systems, esoteric deities absorbed into new pantheons, the practice continuing under a different name while the original source is forgotten. The result, for this third stream, is a Ḍākinī seen only as sky-dancer and wisdom-being: real, but incomplete.
None of these three groups is simply wrong. Each has grasped something real. What I am telling you is that there is a source, a living unbroken Himalayan lineage, that holds the complete picture from which all three streams flow. That source is the Siddha Dharma tradition of Kaulantak Peeth. This is not a claim made lightly. Over the course of this series, I will show you, not just assert, why this is the case.
But before cosmology, before the mandala, before engaging the scholars: the word itself.
You may have heard that Ḍākinī means "sky-dancer" or "she who flies." That is actually the meaning of Khecharī, where kha is sky and charī means to move. Ḍākinīs are indeed khecharī; they can move through space. But that describes one capacity, not the essential nature.
Ḍākinī (डाकिनी) comes from the root Ḍāka (डाक). And Ḍāka is connected to a concept called haraṇa (हरण).
Haraṇa is typically translated as "seizure." Taking. Snatching. And if you start there, if "Ḍākinī" means "she who seizes," then of course you arrive at something frightening. She seizes your prāṇa. She seizes your mind. She devours.
This is where all three streams went wrong. Not because the word is wrong, but because the translation is shallow.
In the Siddha Dharma tradition, as taught by Kaulantak Peethadhishwara Mahasiddha Ishaputra, haraṇa does not mean the seizure of a thief. It means the haraṇa of transmission.
Think of a flame touching a new wick. The fire passes. Has the first flame lost anything? No. The fire has been transmitted, duplicated, carried forward. The new wick "seized" the fire, but the original burns exactly as before.
This is the Ḍākinī's haraṇa. She carries knowledge from one realm to another, from divine to human, from guru to disciple, and nothing is lost from the source. She is not a taker. She is the supreme transmitter. The carrier of wisdom across realms.
And Ḍāk, even today in Hindi, carries this resonance. The postal system. The delivery. The message carried across distance. This is not a coincidence.
There is also a deeper sonic dimension. The Ḍākinī's bīja, her seed syllable ḍaṃ, is connected to the ḍamaru, Shiva's drum. When both sides of the ḍamaru strike, the resonance meets in the middle: the point where opposites unify. Male and female. Creation and destruction. Bhoga and mokṣa (indulgence and liberation). The Ḍākinī lives at that meeting point. She does not ask you to choose one side. She holds both.
Haraṇa also carries a second dimension. The Ḍākinī can absorb and take away the accumulated negative karma, the spiritual burden of the practitioner. She takes what binds you so that you may be free. This too is haraṇa, but it is the haraṇa of compassion, not theft.
The word itself carries both functions: she transmits wisdom and she absorbs darkness. Two sides of one haraṇa.
Now you can see what happened historically. Traditions that encountered Ḍākinī power without this framework experienced the "seizure" but not the context. They felt the overwhelming force of her transmission and, without the key, interpreted it as attack. The word was the same. The experience was partial. The understanding was inverted.
For the person who may not care about textual history, who is here because they feel genuinely drawn to tantra, to shakti practice, to something real: let me say something directly.
If you have been looking for a path that does not ask you to pretend to be someone you are not before you can begin, if you want a practice that meets you in your actual life and not in some imagined purity you cannot achieve, then what this series shares will matter to you.
The Ḍākinī tradition, approached correctly through the guru and the living lineage, does specific things. She makes you fearless, not reckless, but genuinely unafraid to face what is real. She gives you the capacity to resist forces that would crush you, not through aggression but through a clarity that cannot be shaken. She awakens creativity, not as a concept but as a lived capacity to see new possibilities and act on them. She purifies, burning through accumulated negativity, karmic weight, patterns you have carried so long you forgot they were not yours.
She does not ask if you are worthy enough, pure enough, the right background, the right gender. She accepts all who approach sincerely. And she gives access to knowledge, not just spiritual knowledge but practical, immediate, applicable knowledge, because she is the supreme transmitter. That is her nature.
This is not metaphor. This is what the sādhana does.
One more thing before we move on. The Ḍāka.
Every Ḍākinī has a masculine counterpart called a Ḍāka. Where Ḍākinī is the dynamic, transmitting, independent feminine principle, Ḍāka is the anchoring, holding masculine principle. They are two aspects of one reality. At the summit of the entire Ḍākinī maṇḍala, the supreme Ḍākinī is called Hiraṇya Sāmrājñī, the golden empress. And her Ḍāka is called Hiraṇya Gotra, the golden source. Gotra means lineage, origin.
So the tradition itself encodes the relationship: the feminine transmits, the masculine sources. Neither is complete without the other. Together they form the architecture of a maṇḍala that maps not only the cosmos but your own body.
That is the subject of the next article.
All teachings in this series are drawn from the authoritative knowledge corpus of Kaulantak Peeth, and the Siddha Dharma tradition as revealed by Kaulantak Nath Mahasiddha Ishaputra.
If you wish to reference this article:
APA: Nath, A. (2026). The Shakti They Got Wrong. Siddha Tantra Arts. https://www.siddhatantraarts.com/articles/dakini-the-shakti-they-got-wrong
Chicago: Mahayogi Ashutosh Nath. "The Shakti They Got Wrong." Siddha Tantra Arts, 2026. https://www.siddhatantraarts.com/articles/dakini-the-shakti-they-got-wrong
