Yakshini — Yakṣiṇī, also Yakshi — is the female yaksha: the nature-spirit and tree-goddess of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition, at once a benevolent fertility-genius and a dangerous, seductive demoness. Beautiful, voluptuous, and intimately bound to trees and the fecund earth, the yakshini is one of the most ancient and enduring feminine spirit-figures of the subcontinent — worshipped for boons, dreaded as a man-luring vampire, and sculpted on temple walls as the very emblem of life’s abundance.
The Tree-Goddess of Abundance
In her benevolent aspect the yakshini is a spirit of fertility, growth, and prosperity. The shalabhanjika — the sculpted maiden grasping the branch of a flowering sal or ashoka tree, her touch causing it to blossom — is a yakshini, and one of the most beloved motifs of Indian art, adorning the great Buddhist gateways of Sanchi and Bharhut and countless temple brackets. She represents the auspicious union of woman and tree, the life-giving sap of the world. As attendants of Kubera the yakshinis, like their male counterparts, guard hidden treasure and grant wealth; tantric texts list thirty-six (or sixty-four) named yakshinis whose worship can win a devotee riches, beauty, or a celestial lover.
The Seductress in the Tree
But the yakshini has a darker, far more famous face in folklore — especially in Kerala and the south, where she is a feared night-spirit. In this aspect she haunts solitary trees (the palmyra and the pala/devil-tree above all), appearing as a ravishingly beautiful woman who lures lone male travellers with her perfume and her request for betel-leaf or lime, then drains their blood and devours them, leaving only hair, nails, and bones beneath her tree by morning. The Keralan Yakshi of legend is a vampire-temptress, the spirit (often) of a woman who died unfulfilled or by violence, and tales of her victims are a staple of South Indian ghost-lore. She can be bound and pacified by a sufficiently powerful sorcerer or by nailing her to her tree with an iron spike.
The Jain and Buddhist Guardian
In Jainism the yakshinis are elevated to dignified guardian-deities: each of the twenty-four Tirthankaras has an attendant yakshini (such as Ambika, Chakreshvari, and Padmavati) who protects the faith and the faithful, and these are objects of serious devotion. In Buddhism too the yakshini appears as both protector and peril. Across all three traditions she keeps her essential doubleness — the spirit who can bestow a child, a fortune, or a lover, and the spirit who can lure a man to a bloody death.
The Eternal Double Nature
The yakshini endures because she holds two truths in one body: the generative power of nature is also its devouring power; the beauty that gives life is the beauty that takes it. Sculpted as the blossoming tree-maiden and whispered of as the blood-drinking spirit of the lonely palmyra, she is fertility and death entwined — the feminine face of the wild, sacred, perilous earth that the yakshas guard.