Tara

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The Tibetan name says what she does before any doctrine has to. Drolma — sgrol ma — comes from the verb to ferry across, to liberate, and it renders a Sanskrit name read the same way: Tārā, the one who carries over. The imagery beneath the name is steady from text to text, a list of the places a person can be trapped. A flood. A fire. A road held by thieves. A prison. A wild elephant, a lion, a snake, a hungering ghost. The figure who hears the name spoken and is already there, arriving before the cry is finished, before the danger has been earned or even fully named.

Green Tara, central Tibet, circa 1260s, gum tempera and gold on cotton; Cleveland Museum of Art — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art)

Tara is a female deity of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, honored across the Himalayan world above any other office as the swift savior — the help that comes first and asks afterward. She is not approached as a consort or an attendant of someone greater. She is addressed directly, in her own name, and held to act in her own person. Of the vast Buddhist pantheon she is, by a wide margin, the most intimately and continuously prayed to, and the one whose worship has traveled furthest.

The eight great fears

The oldest stratum of her cult is the rescue itself. The catalog of perils is fixed early as the aṣṭamahābhaya, the eight great fears, and the iconography that depicts Tara surrounded by them — water and fire, lions and elephants, snakes and thieves, imprisonment and malign spirits — is among the most stable in Indian Buddhist art. A text describing this scheme is attributed to the Indian poet-scholar Candragomin in roughly the seventh century, and the surviving reliefs cluster in the Pala-period east and in the rock-cut sanctuaries of western India, where the eight-fears motif first appears beside images of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. The list is double-coded from the start. Read literally, the perils are the real hazards of a road or a sea voyage, which is why the deity was a favorite of merchants and mariners; read inwardly, the eight outer dangers answer to eight inner ones — pride, delusion, anger, envy, wrong view, avarice, attachment, doubt — so that the goddess who pulls a traveler from a flooded river is the same power that pulls a mind out of its own afflictions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s tenth- to eleventh-century relief of the eight-fears Tara shows the scheme in its mature form, the small scenes of rescue ranged around the central figure.

She appears in Indian Buddhist sources from around the sixth or seventh century CE. One of the earliest literary mentions falls in the seventh-century romance Vāsavadattā of Subandhu; the earliest securely dated trace of her cult is epigraphic and lies far to the east of India, in the Kalasan inscription of central Java, dated 778 CE, which records that a temple — a Tārābhavanam, a house for the goddess Tara — was raised for her under the Śailendra dynasty. That a dedication to her was carved in stone in Java within roughly a century of her first appearance in the Indian record is the measure of how fast the cult moved. By the high Pala period (eighth to twelfth century), in the Buddhist heartland of Bengal and Bihar, she was among the most carved and most invoked deities of the eastern Indian world, her sādhanas gathered in the Sanskrit ritual compendium known as the Sādhanamālā.

Gilded bronze figure of Tara, eastern Sri Lanka, circa 700–750 CE; British Museum, London — photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Candi Kalasan in central Java, the “house for Tara” recorded in the 778 CE Kalasan inscription — photo by Gunawan Kartapranata, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A devotional account widely repeated explains her descent from compassion itself: that she sprang from a tear of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, wept as he looked on the suffering of beings — the tear falling into a lotus, the lotus opening to reveal her, already moving to help. The story makes her the active edge of compassion, the moment in which pity becomes rescue.

Green and White, and the twenty-one

Tradition counts twenty-one forms of Tara, and the Praise in Twenty-One Homages is recited across the Tibetan world, each verse saluting one aspect of her. Two systematizations of these forms are remembered side by side. The Indian adept Sūryagupta is credited with a tradition in which each of the twenty-one is wholly distinct — varying in color, posture, number of faces and arms, and the implements held; the later master Atīśa Dīpaṃkara (982–1054), trained at Vikramaśīla, transmitted a quieter scheme in which the twenty-one are alike in form and told apart mainly by color and by the peaceful or wrathful cast of the face. Atīśa’s arrival in Tibet in the eleventh century is the hinge on which the Tibetan cult turns; from his teaching forward, Tara became one of the most universally worshipped deities of Tibetan Buddhism, her practice held not by one school but by all of them.

Of the twenty-one, two are everywhere in practice. Green Tara — Śyāma Tārā, and in the Sādhanamālā the Khadiravaṇī Tārā, “Tara of the khadira acacia forest” — is the active savior: green, holding the blue lotus, her right foot stepped down off the lotus seat as though she is already half-risen to come. She is the form to which the rescue imagery most directly belongs. White Tara — seated, serene, full-faced, marked in her developed iconography by seven eyes, the extra eyes set in her forehead, palms, and soles — is the form invoked for long life and for healing, her gaze the opposite of the leaning urgency of the green: stillness rather than speed. Between the two, the goddess holds both registers, the one who runs and the one who steadies.

White Tara (Sita Tara), central Tibet, 19th century, mineral pigments and gold on cotton; Los Angeles County Museum of Art — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (PD)

Her short mantra, oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā, is among the most recited formulae in the entire Tibetan world; the three central words name three liberations — from cyclic existence, from the eight fears, from sickness — folding her whole work into a few syllables. Devotional accounts tell that, in a former age when a Buddha named Dundubhīśvara taught, she was a princess called Yeshe Dawa, Wisdom Moon, far advanced on the path; and that when she was counseled to pray for rebirth in a male body as the more expedient vehicle for awakening, she answered that the division of male and female is empty, a fiction of deluded mind, and vowed to attain enlightenment in a female body and to keep returning in one for as long as the round of suffering lasts. The story has often been heard by later readers as a claim made for the female form as such; the texts that carry it frame it as her own resolve, the elder retelling preserved in The Origin of the Tārā Tantra by the Tibetan historian Tāranātha (1575–1634), who drew it from earlier Indian sources.

The fierce Tara of Hindu Tantra

A separate Tara belongs to Hinduism, and the two should not be folded together. There she is the second of the ten Mahāvidyās, the “great wisdoms” of Śākta Tantra — and far from a consoling savior, she is fierce and dark, close in type to Kali: blue-black, short and heavy-bodied, standing in the warrior’s stride upon a corpse, garlanded with severed heads, haunted by jackals and the cremation ground. Within the Hindu Tantric setting she carries her own names and her own genealogy of forms — Ugra-Tārā, the fierce one; Nīla-Sarasvatī, the blue Sarasvatī, a goddess of speech turned terrible; and the Ekajaṭā of the single matted lock — a knot of overlapping figures whose ferocity, in the texts, is reckoned second only to Kali’s.

Ugratara, the fierce (“violent”) Tara of Hindu Tantra, second of the ten Mahāvidyās — photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What makes this Tara more than a coincidence of names is what the Hindu Tantric tradition says about her itself. Several Tantras — among them the Rudrayāmala, the Brahmayāmala, and the Tārā Tantra — derive her worship from Mahācīna, “Greater China,” a designation that in this literature reaches toward Tibet and the Buddhist north; and they tell of the sage Vasiṣṭha traveling to that country to learn her rite directly from the Buddha, returning with the cīnācāra, the “Chinese practice,” a left-hand discipline. In her Hindu iconography the Mahācīna-Tārā is crowned with the buddha Akṣobhya, exactly as a Vajrayāna emanation would be. The Tantric scholar Benoytosh Bhattacharyya, in The Indian Buddhist Iconography (1924), read this plainly as the Buddhist Ugra-Tārā absorbed into the Hindu pantheon and reranked among the Mahāvidyās. That is the tradition’s own account, reported as such, and it is precisely where modern scholarship grows cautious: the two figures arise in overlapping eastern-Indian Tantric milieus where Buddhist and Śaiva-Śākta currents were not sealed off from one another, and the direction of any borrowing between the Buddhist savioress and the Hindu Mahāvidyā is treated as a genuine open question rather than a settled debt. David Kinsley, in Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine (1997), holds the puzzle open in just this way, declining to fix which goddess gave and which received. The shared name marks a real seam between two Tantric worlds; what ran across it, and in which direction, is not demonstrated.

The feminine made central

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 two faces could hardly be less alike: the green savior leaning forward off her lotus, and the blue-black goddess on the corpse. Yet each is approached as a power complete in herself, not the wife or the shadow of a male deity. The Buddhist Tara is the gentler face of that centrality, 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.

Sources and scholarship

The standard scholarly study of the Tibetan cult remains Stephan Beyer’s The Cult of Tārā: Magic and Ritual in Tibet (University of California Press, 1973), a five-hundred-page account of her ritual life with translations from Sanskrit and Tibetan. Miranda Shaw’s Buddhist Goddesses of India (Princeton University Press, 2006) gives the fullest synthetic treatment of Tara’s Indian emergence and her place among the goddesses of the Mahayana, gathering the descent legends, the eight-fears iconography, and the vow of the female body. For the Hindu Mahāvidyā, David Kinsley’s Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (University of California Press, 1997) is the standard English account, treating Tara as the bridge figure who is at once savior and devourer. The early iconographic and textual record is laid out in Benoytosh Bhattacharyya’s The Indian Buddhist Iconography, drawing on the Sādhanamālā (the Sanskrit sādhana compendium he himself edited), and the eight-fears imagery and its meaning are surveyed in the Rubin Museum’s Project Himalayan Art. The 778 CE Kalasan inscription fixes the earliest dated public monument of her worship.

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