Sacred Feminine in Buddhism:Reclaiming the Divine

The world is out of balance. Ecological crisis, fractured relationships, and lives splintered across competing demands—these are the symptoms. But beneath them lies something less visible and rarely named in spiritual circles: the systematic absence of the sacred feminine. This absence, Lama Tsultrim Allione argues, is not incidental to our predicament. It is central. And Buddhism, which contains within its tantric traditions the most sophisticated teachings on the feminine the world has known, is being called to remember what it once awakened.

This is the spine of Wisdom Rising, a four-day retreat held in September 2015 and led by some of Buddhism's most accomplished female teachers. But the conference is not simply about gender parity—though that matters urgently. It is about recovering a cosmology, a way of relating to the body, to nature, and to the sacred itself that was nearly lost when Buddhism traveled from India to Tibet and then to the West, each transition narrowing the space for the feminine.

The Tantric Opening

To understand why the sacred feminine needs reawakening, you have to know what happened in India around 700 CE. The tantric period had begun—a revolution within Buddhism itself. Before this, the feminine had made only tentative appearances. In the Mahayana period, Prajna Paramita (the Perfection of Wisdom) was identified as feminine, though as Allione notes, wisdom itself transcends gender. But she was there, identified with capacity, with knowing. In the tantric turn, everything opened. Female Buddhas emerged. Dakinis—the wisdom beings of Buddhist tantra—took their place in the sacred landscape. Tara, Bhagavati, Simhamuka, and other female deities became not ornamental but essential to the path.

With this feminine presence came a complete inversion of how the body and the senses were understood. Earlier Buddhist teaching, influenced by the Buddha's own emphasis on cessation—the escape from suffering—tended toward renunciation of the embodied life. Nirvana meant cessation, getting out of the mess. The body, nature, and women themselves were not sacred; they were part of what needed to be transcended. This created a profound split: the spiritual was somewhere else, somewhere up and out, divorced from the earth.

Tantra healed this split. In tantric Buddhism, sacred sexuality and embodied practice became vehicles for liberation, not obstacles to it. The senses, the body, the very earth became not things to escape but gateways to the sacred. This is what Allione calls the sacralization of embodiment—the recognition that life itself is not a problem to solve but a mystery to enter more fully. It is why, in tantric practice, objects around you are sacred, why holidays can be re-sacralized through gratitude, why what appears ordinary becomes pregnant with meaning.

What Is the Divine Feminine?

To try to define the sacred feminine is to immediately run into its essential nature: it is ineffable. Prajna Paramita, Allione notes, is described in the Heart Sutra as inconceivable and unexplainable. Yet we can point toward it.

One quality is the sacralization of embodiment itself—the understanding that preciousness and sacredness live in the body, in nature, in matter. This stands in direct contrast to religions organized around the divine masculine, which tend to place the sacred elsewhere, beyond the body, beyond the world. Women and nature have been cast as obstacles to reaching that transcendent state.

Another is connectedness. Buddhist teaching often frames attachment as the root of suffering (the Second Noble Truth), but the sacred feminine values relationship itself as sacred. There is a difference—one Allione emphasizes—between attachment, grasping, and craving on one hand, and genuine connectedness, appreciation, and relationship on the other. The feminine holds both: it honors relationship not as a problem to overcome but as a dimension of what makes life precious. This extends beyond human connection: it includes our relationship with animals, with nature, with the world itself.

A third dimension is spaciousness. The space element in Buddhist philosophy—the ground of being, all-pervasive emptiness—is understood as a feminine quality. This is not emptiness as void or negation, but as the open, receptive field in which all phenomena arise, the pregnant silence from which all manifestation emerges.

From Tantra to Tibet: How the Feminine Faded

The tantric efflorescence lasted roughly five hundred years, from around 700 CE to 1200, after which Buddhism declined in India itself. But before it did, Tibetan teachers traveled to India and brought back the complete tantric teachings, including the divine feminine, to Tibet.

What happened next is the heart of the problem. Tibet was a patriarchal feudal society. The monastic institutions that became central to Tibetan Buddhism were almost entirely male. The lineages that preserved the teachings became male-dominated. Yes, Allione notes, there were women teachers—Yeshe Tsogyel, Drikung Drubchen, a few others—but when you count them, you run out. The gap is immense.

Theoretically, the teachings remained. In iconography and in subtle philosophy, the union of masculine and feminine, the equality of male and female principles, was preserved. But sociologically, in how Buddhism actually functioned as a living institution, the feminine largely disappeared. The theory was beautiful; the practice was patriarchal. And this was not a failure unique to Tibet. When Buddhism arrived in the West, the same pattern held. There are now many accomplished female Buddhist teachers in Western Buddhism—a real shift—but much of the institutional power and recognition still flows along male channels.

Why This Matters Now

The rebalancing is not metaphorical. Allione points out that wherever the masculine has dominated religion, nature has been degraded. This is not coincidental. A spirituality that devalues the body, the senses, the earth, and the feminine as obstacles to the divine creates the psychological and theological conditions for exploiting all three. Conversely, to reawaken the sacred feminine is to simultaneously remember that the world is not something to escape but something to honor, that women are not lesser but equal carriers of wisdom, that our bodies and the living earth are not problems but sacred ground.

This is why Wisdom Rising exists. It is why Allione has collaborated with Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and other works exploring feminine power and dignity, to bring this conversation out of academic Buddhism and into the world. The movement is already happening globally, within Buddhism and beyond it. But it requires recognition, intention, and sustained effort, especially from those—including men—who recognize that a balanced world requires both.

Practice as Reawakening

Wisdom Rising includes guided meditations and practices. One accessible entry point is Tara practice. Tara, available and direct, is considered highly accessible. When you sit with her, you recognize that objects around you are sacred, that holidays can be re-sacralized through conscious attention and gratitude, that ordinary life can become luminous if we practice with the understanding that embodiment itself is the ground of awakening, not an obstacle to it.

Where to go from here

To deepen this exploration, engage with Allimore's books Women of Wisdom and Feeding Your Demons, which weave together Buddhist psychology and the wisdom of the feminine. Seek out teachings on female deities—Tara, Simhamuka, Prajna Paramita—not as historical curiosities but as living wisdom beings. Practice in community, especially in spaces that honor both masculine and feminine principles. Listen to the voices of women teachers emerging in Western Buddhism, and if you are a man, ask yourself how you can support rather than overshadow them. The sacred feminine is not the property of women; it is a principle of reality that all humans must honor and embody to help restore balance to ourselves and our world.