Tibetan thangka of Vajrayogini is hand-painted on Cotton Canvas in Kathmandu, Nepal. Vajrayogini is one of the most important Dakinis. Vajrayogini is a yidam of the Highest Tantra and appears in many Tantric practices.
Vajrayogini is presented at the center of the thangka. Vajrayogini is youthful and passionate about the Dharma. Her eyes are red and she has a forked tongue protruding through her teeth.
Iconography of Vajrayogini
Vajrayogini dances with her right leg raised and has between four and twenty-four arms. Vajrayogini embodies the wisdom energy of fearlessness and transformation. To recognize her as inseparable from the emptiness of one's innermost nature is to stand blowing on a sun and moon disc and to trample beneath one's feet the petty emotions and preoccupations that confine us to the unenlightened state.
To embody Vajrayogini's exalted qualities is to be naked before the world and adorned only in bone ornaments and a necklace of fifty – one skull – the trophies of having severed the roots of all mental illusions. In her right hand, Vajrayogini holds a curved knife and, in the other, a skull cup filled with blood. Vajraogini is holding aloft this essence of the life force – or by other accounts, the nectar of choiceless awareness.
she pours it down her open throat. A Tantric staff rests against her left shoulder, symbolizing the awakening of bliss within the psychic channel that parallels the spine and flowers at the heart. As a female icon of enlightened energy, Vajrayogini transforms worldly passions into luminous awareness.
Vajrayogini is the female form of an enlightened Buddha, the one who brings all actions to miraculous fruition.
Mantra of Vajrayogini
The mantra of Vajrayogini is om va jra yo gi ni hum pha t sva ha.
