Tara

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Tara is a female deity of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, revered as a bodhisattva of compassion and called upon, above any other office, as the one who arrives in danger and carries the petitioner across. The Tibetan name for her, Drolma, means roughly “she who liberates” or “she who ferries over,” and the imagery is constant in the texts: a flood, a fire, a road of thieves, a prison, and the figure who reaches the trapped before reason could.

She appears in Indian Buddhist sources from around the sixth or seventh century CE and becomes one of the most widely worshipped deities of Tibet, where her cult is enormous and intimate. Tradition counts twenty-one forms of her, but two are everywhere in practice. Green Tara is the active savior, half-rising from her lotus seat as though already moving to help; White Tara, seated and serene, is invoked for long life and healing. Devotional accounts tell that she vowed to attain enlightenment in a female body and to keep returning in one, against the counsel that rebirth as a man would be more expedient — a story later readers have often heard as a claim made for the female form itself, though the texts frame it as her own resolve. Her short mantra, oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā, is among the most recited in the Tibetan world.

A separate Tara belongs to Hinduism, and the two should not be folded together. There she is one of the ten Mahavidyas, the “great wisdoms” of Shakta Tantra — a fierce, dark goddess close in type to Kali, standing on a corpse, garlanded with severed heads, fearsome rather than consoling. Scholarship treats the shared name as a genuine puzzle rather than a settled borrowing: the two figures arise in overlapping Tantric milieus in eastern India, and the direction of any influence between Buddhist savioress and Hindu Mahavidya is debated, not demonstrated.

What the name carries in both settings is the feminine divine made central rather than consort or attendant — worshipped in her own right, addressed directly, held to act. The Buddhist Tara is the gentler face of that, and by far the more diffused: a goddess whose chief attribute is simply speed, the help that comes before it is deserved or even fully asked. Practitioners across the Himalayas have prayed to her in exactly those terms for more than a thousand years, and the prayers are still in daily use.