Dakini Power: Twelve Extraordinary Women Shaping the Transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West is a 2013 book by journalist and Buddhist practitioner Michaela Haas. Published by Snow Lion, an imprint of Shambhala Publications, the book presents twelve biographical profiles of women who helped shape Buddhist practice, teaching, scholarship, and institutions in Western contexts. The Seventeenth Karmapa contributed the foreword.
What the book covers
Haas combines interviews, biography, and reporting. Rather than presenting a single model of Buddhist leadership, the book follows women from different cultural backgrounds and religious roles: Tibetan and Western teachers, nuns, scholars, translators, community founders, and practitioners working across several Buddhist lineages.
The book’s central concern is not simply gender representation. It asks how Buddhist teachings are transmitted when traditions move across cultures, how women work within institutions historically dominated by men, and how authority is formed through practice, study, teaching, service, and community life.
The twelve women featured in Dakini Power
Michaela Haas’s official book page lists the following twelve women:
- Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher associated with the Mindrolling tradition.
- Dagmola Kusho Sakya, a teacher in the Sakya tradition who helped transmit Tibetan Buddhist practice in the West.
- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, a British-born Buddhist nun known for extended retreat practice and for supporting improved opportunities for Buddhist nuns.
- Pema Chödrön, an American-born Buddhist nun and widely read teacher and author.
- Khandro Tsering Chödrön, a Tibetan practitioner remembered for her close association with major Nyingma teachers and communities.
- Thubten Chodron, an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun, teacher, author, and founder of Sravasti Abbey.
- Karma Lekshe Tsomo, a Buddhist nun and scholar known for work on Buddhist women, education, and interreligious dialogue.
- Chagdud Khadro, a Western Buddhist practitioner and teacher associated with the Chagdud Gonpa community.
- Sangye Khandro, a teacher and translator whose work has helped make Tibetan Buddhist teachings available to English-speaking practitioners.
- Roshi Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher and social activist whose inclusion broadens the book’s discussion of women shaping Buddhism in the West.
- Lama Tsultrim Allione, a teacher, author, and founder of Tara Mandala who has written extensively about women and Buddhist practice.
- Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, a teacher and author whose work addresses Buddhist practice, inquiry, and contemporary life.
This list matters because the book is organized around twelve specific profiles. Earlier summaries that substitute other prominent Buddhist women can misrepresent the book’s actual contents.
Major themes
Women and Buddhist authority
Several profiles describe women developing respected teaching roles within settings where institutional authority was historically concentrated among men. Their experiences are not identical: some worked within traditional structures, while others founded new communities or educational projects. The book therefore treats women’s leadership as a varied historical process rather than a single movement.
Transmission from Asia to the West
The women profiled also illustrate different forms of cultural transmission. Some were born in Tibetan or Himalayan communities; others encountered Buddhism in Europe or North America and later trained in Asian traditions. Haas uses these biographies to show how teachings, rituals, monastic forms, translation, publishing, and community organization change as Buddhism enters new social settings.
Practice outside a single stereotype
Dakini Power includes monastics and lay practitioners, scholars and meditation teachers, writers and institution builders. That range challenges the idea that serious Buddhist practice has only one social form. At the same time, the book remains a collection of selected biographies rather than a complete history of Buddhist women.
Why the title uses the word “dakini”
In Vajrayana Buddhism, the term dakini has complex ritual, symbolic, and doctrinal meanings and cannot simply be translated as “powerful woman.” Haas uses the term in the book title to evoke female spiritual energy, insight, and unconventional forms of authority. Readers should distinguish that literary framing from the more technical meanings of dakini found in Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
Strengths and limitations of the book
The book’s main strength is biographical detail. Readers encounter Buddhist transmission through individual lives rather than through abstract institutional history alone. The interviews also preserve first-person perspectives on practice, discrimination, leadership, cultural adaptation, and teaching.
Its scope is selective. The twelve profiles cannot represent all Buddhist women, all Tibetan Buddhist schools, or every debate about gender and ordination. One of the featured teachers, Roshi Joan Halifax, is primarily associated with Zen rather than Tibetan Buddhism, which also shows that the book’s focus extends beyond a narrowly defined institutional category.
Who may find it useful
What distinguishes this book is its use of contemporary biographies to show Tibetan Buddhist women as teachers, practitioners, and lineage holders rather than as a single symbolic category. Each profile should be read in its own institutional and historical context.
Dakini Power is most useful for readers interested in modern Buddhism, women in religious leadership, Tibetan Buddhism in Western societies, and biography as a way of understanding religious change. It can also serve as a starting point for studying how Buddhist communities negotiate tradition, authority, gender, and cultural adaptation.
