Vajrayogini is a fully enlightened buddha in female form and a dakini, one of the most important female deities of the higher, or Highest Yoga, tantras of Vajrayana Buddhism. She is depicted red in colour, youthful and dancing, holding a curved flaying-knife (kartika) in one hand and a skull-cup (kapala) in the other, with a trident-topped staff (khatvanga) resting across her shoulder and her head turned upward, drinking. Each feature of this striking iconography carries meaning within the symbolic language of the tantras: the curved knife represents the cutting away of ego-clinging and dualistic thought, the skull-cup the transmutation of the ordinary into the blissful awareness of emptiness, and her dancing posture and upward gaze the union of bliss and wisdom that is the goal of the practice. She is the principal yidam, or meditational deity, of several of the Sarma (later-translation) lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly within the Sakya and Kagyu traditions, and is closely associated with the deity Chakrasamvara.
As a deity of the Highest Yoga Tantra, the full practice of Vajrayogini is transmitted only through initiation and the guidance of a qualified teacher within the living lineage, and its details are not set out in general reference; described here at the level of her form and her recognised significance, she stands as one of the tradition's central images of enlightenment realised in a female buddha, the embodiment of the wisdom that transforms the passions themselves into the path.