Chausath Yoginiचौंसठ योगिनी

The Chausath Yogini temples are the strangest buildings in Indian religion.

They are circular — or, at Khajuraho and Bheraghat, rectangular and then circular — with a ring of small niches around the inside of a wall, each holding one goddess, and an open courtyard in the middle with no roof over it. There is no shikhara, no garbhagriha in the usual sense, no processional corridor and no axis. A visitor stands in the middle and is surrounded.

Every other temple form in India is built around a centre you approach. These are built around a space you occupy.

The goddesses in the niches are yoginis: attendants, emanations and multiplications of the Goddess, belonging to the Kaula and Vidyapitha streams of Tantra, and numbering — in the temples that give a number — sixty-four, though the count at Bheraghat is eighty-one and the lists of names differ so completely between sites that there is no canonical sixty-four.

Fewer than a dozen of these buildings survive, mostly in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh, built roughly between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. The cult that needed them was initiatory, largely unwritten in any public text, and is now almost entirely gone. The buildings are what is left of it, and they are the reason the yoginis are discussed at all.

Out of the Matrikas, and further out. The yoginis grow from the same stratum as the Saptamatrika — the numerous, dangerous, unnamed female powers of the epic and the medical literature — but they went in the opposite direction. Where the Matrikas were reduced to seven, named after male gods and installed on temple walls as auspicious mothers, the yoginis were multiplied, given their own circular buildings away from town, and kept in a body of literature that was deliberately not public.

The Matrikas appear inside yogini sets at several sites, which shows the relationship without settling it.

The Kaula texts. The Kaulajnananirnaya, attributed to Matsyendranatha, the Brahmayamala, the Kubjikamata Tantra and the Vidyapitha literature are where the yoginis belong. In that material a yogini is not a minor attendant. She is a source of transmission: the practitioner's aim is yogini-melaka, encounter with a yogini, and what is transmitted in that encounter is the tradition itself. The Kaulajnananirnaya presents its own teaching as having come that way.

This is the key to the buildings. A shrine designed so that the practitioner stands in the middle of sixty-four goddesses, under the open sky, at night, is a shrine built for an encounter rather than for darshan.

Why sixty-four. The number is a completeness figure in Indian systems — sixty-four kalas (arts), sixty-four Bhairavas, sixty-four tantras, sixty-four yoginis. It signals totality rather than an enumerated roster, which is consistent with the fact that no two temples agree on the names. Bheraghat has eighty-one niches and inscribed names; Hirapur has sixty-four; Ranipur-Jharial had around sixty-four; the Khajuraho shrine has sixty-five niches. The lists overlap only partially.

Royal patronage. The temples are not folk buildings. Bheraghat was built under the Kalachuris, Mitaoli carries an inscription of 1323 CE under the Kachchhapaghatas, and the scale and finish of the sculpture at Bheraghat is of the highest order. Yogini cults had court patronage — a fact that sits oddly with their reputation and is worth holding on to.

And then they stop. No yogini temples are built after roughly the fourteenth century. The reasons are not documented. What is documented is that by the modern period most of the buildings were ruined or repurposed, many images had been removed, and the living practice had thinned to almost nothing.

The building is the icon. A ring of niches, open to the sky, with the goddesses facing inward toward the empty centre. At Hirapur there are sixty-four niches in a low circular wall about nine metres across, with a small square shrine in the middle; at Ranipur-Jharial the circle is larger and the central shrine holds a dancing Shiva; at Mitaoli the circle is over fifty metres across with a pillared corridor.

The yoginis themselves. Standing or seated on individual vahanas, and the variety is the striking part — a jackal, a scorpion, an owl, a tortoise, a rat, a horse, a peacock, a corpse, a crab, a snake. No other Indian sculptural set has this range, and it reads as deliberate: sixty-four different creatures for sixty-four different powers.

Faces. Mostly human and beautiful; a minority are animal-headed — boar, lion, horse, elephant, snake, bird. The Hirapur set is largely human-faced; other sites differ.

Attributes. Weapons, skull-bowls, severed heads, musical instruments, mirrors, children. Several are shown standing on a corpse; several are dancing.

At the centre. Usually Bhairava or a form of Shiva — at Hirapur a three-faced Bhairava; at Ranipur-Jharial a dancing Shiva; at Bheraghat a later Shiva-Parvati shrine added on top. The arrangement makes the god the still point of the circle, not its object.

Erotic sculpture. Present at some sites, absent at others, and much less prominent than the popular reputation of these temples suggests. Khajuraho's fame has been transferred onto the yogini shrines rather indiscriminately.

And the sky. The single most important feature. No roof. Whether the reason was that the yoginis were held to fly, or that the courtyard functioned as a mandala open to the heavens, or something else, is not recorded anywhere, and this page does not invent a reason.

The sixty-four. Named differently at every site; the Agni Purana, Skanda Purana and the Tantras each give lists, and they do not match.

Eighty-one. Bheraghat has eighty-one niches with inscribed names — a related scheme, and the largest surviving set.

The Matrikas within. Brahmani, Maheshvari, Kaumari, Vaishnavi, Varahi, Indrani and Chamunda appear within several yogini sets. The Saptamatrika page argues that the Chausath Yogini are a different and older Tantric system that overlaps with the Matrikas without being an expansion of them, and this page holds the same line.

Varahi in particular is prominent at several sites; her page carries her independent cult.

Yogini as a living word. In ordinary modern usage a yogini is a woman who practises yoga. In the Tantric literature she is one of these — and in a third usage she is a class of female practitioners, human women within the Kaula lineages. The three senses are genuinely distinct and are constantly collapsed.

The Ashta Matrika and the Yogini circuits of Nepal. Related goddess systems; the Kathmandu Valley's are a map of the city rather than a ring in one building.

Not the sixty-four Bhairavas, and not the sixty-four kalas. The number recurs; the sets are different.

There is almost no public mythology, and that absence is the most informative thing about them.

The yoginis belong to material that was transmitted under initiation, and the texts that deal with them are practice manuals rather than story collections. What a Purana says about yoginis is generally brief, external and a little wary.

The narratives that do circulate:

Emanation in battle. The commonest Puranic framing: the Goddess, fighting, emits multitudes of yoginis from her body, who fight alongside her and are reabsorbed. It is the Saptamatrika mechanism scaled up, and the Devi Mahatmya's Raktabija episode is its model.

Yogini-melaka. The Kaula aim — encounter. A practitioner who has done what is required meets a yogini, and receives. The Kaulajnananirnaya frames its own transmission this way. It is a doctrine rather than a story and it is the reason the buildings are shaped as they are.

Matsyendranatha. The Nath tradition's founder, associated with the Kaula transmission and with Kamarupa; the Kamakhya page carries that region's material. Later Nath legend has him detained in a kingdom of women and rescued by Gorakhnath, which is a garbled and much later reflex of the yogini material seen from outside.

And the modern claim about Parliament. It is widely repeated that the circular Mitaoli yogini temple inspired the design of the Indian Parliament building. The claim is popular and unsubstantiated: no contemporary record from Lutyens or Baker supports it, and the resemblance is generic. This encyclopedia records that the claim circulates and that there is no evidence for it.

What was actually done in them is not known in detail, and the honest position is that the practice was initiatory, that this page carries none of it, and that speculation about it — of which there is a great deal, much of it lurid — is not knowledge.

Mostly lapsed, and in one place living.

Hirapur (Khordha district, Odisha) retains active worship: the shrine is in use, offerings are made, and it is visited daily. It is the best-preserved of the temples and the only one where the building functions as a temple rather than as a monument.

Elsewhere, worship is intermittent or gone. Ranipur-Jharial is a protected ruin; Bheraghat has a later Gauri-Shankar shrine inside the circle that is worshipped while most of the yogini niches are not; Mitaoli is an Archaeological Survey monument; several sites have lost their images entirely, and yogini sculptures from these temples are in museums in India, Europe and North America — a number of them removed without record, and the subject of provenance questions.

Navaratri, at the active sites.

In Tantric practice. Yogini puja and the yogini chakras persist within initiatory Shakta and Kaula lineages. This encyclopedia carries no initiatory material — the decision recorded for Bagalamukhi, Tripura Sundari and Varahi — and the thinness of this section follows from that rather than from the tradition having nothing.

In Srividya. The yoginis occupy the enclosures of the Sri Chakra, and are worshipped there as part of the navavarana sequence. That is the largest surviving context for them by number of practitioners, and it is a very different thing from a circular temple.

Animal offering was historically made at some of these shrines.

DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes.

Fewer than a dozen survive. The principal ones:

Chausath Yogini Temple, Hirapur (Khordha district, Odisha) — ninth century, about nine metres across, sixty-four niches, hypaethral, with a central chandi mandapa holding Bhairava. The smallest and the best preserved, and the only one in continuous worship. Rediscovered in 1953.

Chausathi Jogini, Ranipur-Jharial (Balangir district, Odisha) — a larger circle on a sandstone outcrop, with a dancing Shiva at the centre; some niches now empty.

Chaunsath Yogini Temple, Bheraghat (Jabalpur district, Madhya Pradesh) — tenth century, Kalachuri, the largest, with eighty-one niches and inscribed names, and a later Gauri-Shankar temple raised inside the circle. The sculpture is the finest of any yogini site.

Chausath Yogini Temple, Mitaoli / Padawali (Morena district, Madhya Pradesh) — inscribed 1323 CE, over fifty metres across, sixty-four cells with a pillared corridor and a central Shiva shrine. The one associated with the unsupported Parliament claim.

Chausath Yogini Temple, Khajuraho (Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh) — the oldest surviving, around the late ninth century, and rectangular rather than circular, with sixty-five cells. Granite, and quite unlike the rest of Khajuraho.

Dudhai and Badoh (Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) — further ruined circles.

Museum collections. Yogini sculptures from Lokhari, Kanchipuram and other sites are in the British Museum, the Musée Guimet, the Metropolitan Museum and elsewhere; several have been the subject of restitution claims, and a Lokhari yogini was returned to India in recent years.

A building shaped like nothing else. Indian temple architecture is overwhelmingly axial and enclosed: a visitor moves inward along a line toward a dark chamber. The yogini temples invert every part of that. They are circular, they are open to the sky, they have no processional axis, and the visitor's position is the middle, surrounded on all sides by goddesses facing in.

That is not a stylistic variation. It is a different theory of what a shrine is for — not a place to go and look at a deity, but a place to stand in the middle of a great many of them.

Multiplication instead of reduction. The Matrikas were reduced to seven, named for male gods, and put on a wall. The yoginis were multiplied to sixty-four, given individual mounts and attributes and no male derivation at all, and put in their own building. Two treatments of the same stratum, going opposite ways, and it is worth asking which one the tradition was more comfortable with — because only one of them is still carved.

Court patronage, not the fringe. Bheraghat is Kalachuri work of the highest quality and Mitaoli carries a royal inscription. Whatever these cults were, they were not marginal in their own time. That fact should discipline the way they are written about.

What is not known. This page has said so several times and it bears repeating: nobody knows why there is no roof, the sixty-four names are not fixed, the practice was initiatory and is largely undocumented, and the reason the buildings stopped being built is unrecorded. There is a great deal of confident writing about yoginis, much of it lurid, and very little of it is knowledge. Silence is the honest content of several of these sections.

And a cult that left only architecture. Most of the deities in this encyclopedia survive as texts, festivals or living practice with the buildings incidental. The yoginis are the reverse: the practice is gone, the names are uncertain, the literature is initiatory or lost — and what remains is eleven or twelve circles of stone, open to the sky, in places that are difficult to get to. They are the most eloquent ruins Indian religion has.