The Ecstatic Dakini, Lion-Headed SimhaMukha

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5"x7" size

Old age brings wisdom and fierce certainty!
SimhaMukha is in love with the dharma, wild and fierce in her defense of those who seek it, and she gleams with the fervor of one with a mission. She is capable of goading and shoving and nagging practitioners who are sliding towards the wrong path, but she is always doing it out of love.

SimhaMukha is a female Dakini-form of the great Mahasiddha Padmasambhava, although some say she was his principle Dakini teacher. She is also the Buddhist version of the Hindu warrior goddess Durga who rides a lion or tiger. She is called the queen of the Dakinis, and as in so many instances, where eras and eons bleed into one another through rebirths, new regimes, and archetype re-creations over time, she is also Queen of the Matrikas, 7 ancient Hindu female goddesses. She has some similarities with the Egyptian Sekhmet, and in the West, her essence is what we might call the Crone, the old wise woman, whose looks have fallen away leaving only the wisdom left to see.

She is a wisdom goddess and can be a yidam, a personal protector deity. She repulses psychic attacks, subdues demons, and keeps nightmares and dark energies away. She helps transform anger or wrath into enlightened awareness and subdues misguided beings. She is naked and her hair is disheveled, as are all Dakinis because she represents going beyond the conventions of society. Her mind is calm, there is no background noise, she is completely present here and now.


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© Laura Santi

★º★ A WORD ABOUT ARCHIVAL GICLEE TECHNOLOGY: The giclee prints I sell of my originals look and feel like paintings and don't loose definition as they are enlarged to the sizes for each piece that I offer. Artwork is scanned via what looks like a really big "camera"/computer and then printed with a sophisticated inkjet printer, which is 5+ feet wide, onto artists' archival heavyweight watercolor paper. It takes about 15 minutes to print a 24"x36". This makes the most crisp accurate print available in fine art printing technology. People often mistake the prints for actual paintings.