Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism

A second answer relates to the ways in which women’s bodies, psychologies, and minds are linked with the dynamic of wisdom.

For the young prince and other renunciant practitioners of pre-Vajrayāna depictions, the bodies of women came to represent the deceptiveness of saṃsāra.

women have a heightened ability to identify problems and to penetrate them without clinging to results.

Since emptiness is not an object of knowledge—since it is not a thing—Prajñāpāramitā is associated with the dynamic way in which one directly realizes the unborn nature of phenomena.

Tibet is unusual in its successful retention of a vital and energized shamanic dimension with influence upon every aspect of culture,

the fundamental insight of tantra is that the nature of our minds and of all phenomena in our experience is completely empty, pure, and awakened.

The absence of distinction between śūnyatā and compassion is known as bodhicitta.”96 The heruka and consort in union are the Vajrayāna expression of awakened heart, bodhicitta.

This means that all ordinary women are manifestations of the ḍākinī principle by virtue of the fact that they have physical female bodies. The female body has a unique ability to radiate the energy of the ḍākinī, whether or not there is any awareness of this on the part of the woman.

When emptiness is realized in this way, all phenomena are found to be pure, just as their source, their mother, is pure.