Yaksas

Particular significance attaches to Yaksas in Indian mythology, religion and art. Their almost universal presence in the earlier Indian religions, Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina, wherein they are invested with peculiar traits and powers, indicates their importance. Ananda Coomaraswamy's Yaksas is an attempt to bring together the mass of information from literary and monumental sources about Yaksas and Yaksi, their origin, and development from the conceptual, mythological and iconographical points of view. Coomaraswamy has shown how this non- and pre-Aryan "animistic" concept originated and, in the historical times, dovetailed with the Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina religious systems to the extent that the concept of Yaksattva got closely bound up with the idea of reincarnation.