Tara

The road east out of Magadha ran through forest, and the forest had lions in it. It also had bandits, cobras lying up in the leaf litter, elephants in musth that would go through a bullock cart without breaking stride, and the fever that came off the river water at dusk. Merchants went anyway, because there was money in Bengal and the alternative was staying poor. Before they went, a great many of them said a name out loud.

The name was Tara, and it came with its own promise built in. In Sanskrit the word means star, the fixed thing a traveller steers by at night. It also sits against the root that means to cross over, to reach the far bank, and the tradition has never much wanted to choose between the two readings. She is the one who gets you across. Across a swollen river, across a stretch of country where the lions are, across the entire width of ordinary existence to whatever lies on the other side of it. All three were treated as versions of the same crossing.

She is usually green and usually young. The images show her bare above the waist and loaded with the jewellery of a bodhisattva, a fine gauze gathering in her lap and falling almost invisibly down her legs. She sits on a lotus, but not in the sealed cross-legged posture of a meditating buddha. Her right leg comes down off the throne and her foot rests on a second, smaller lotus, as though she has already started to get up. Her right hand turns palm-outward at her knee in the gesture that means a gift is being given. At her left shoulder, on a long stalk carried between her fingers, is the utpala, the blue lotus that opens at night.

The beginning of her is lost. In the rock-cut halls at Kanheri and at Nalanda, in reliefs carved in the sixth century, Avalokiteshvara stands attended by women, and one of them holds a lotus, and she may be Tara or may be someone nobody has ever named. The first firmly dated mention of her in writing is not a scripture at all but a Sanskrit romance, Subandhu’s Vasavadatta, from the middle of the seventh century. The earliest surviving record of anyone actually worshipping her is an inscription of 778 from Java, a very long way from those caves. Her images ran ahead of her texts, and her cult ran ahead of both.

Where she came from, in the stories, depends on who is telling it. The account most people meet has Avalokiteshvara looking down at the state of the world and weeping, and one tear falling and pooling into a lake, and a lotus coming up out of the water, and the flower opening to show the goddess sitting inside. Other versions have her step out of his left eye. Either way she is made from his grief, which is an odd origin for a figure whose entire business is competence.

There is a longer and stranger account, set down in Tibetan by the historian Taranatha in 1604 from older Indian material. Aeons ago, in a world called Manifold Light, a king’s daughter named Jnanachandra, Yeshe Dawa in Tibetan, made offerings to a buddha for an immense span of time and was taught the awakened mind. The monks around her were delighted with her progress and told her what monks in these stories usually tell women: pray to come back male, and then you can finish. She refused. Male and female, she said, are notions produced by a confused mind and answer to nothing in ultimate reality, and the belief that a woman’s body is an obstacle is itself the only obstacle in the room. She then vowed to work for the liberation of all beings in a female body, and to keep at it for exactly as long as beings needed liberating. She sat, entered concentration, and came out of it as Tara.

What she is actually asked for, in the oldest surviving liturgy of her cult, is protection from eight specific things. A seventh-century Indian philosopher called Chandragomin fixed the form and its setting, placing her on a lake, inside a jewel cavern. The eight perils are lions, elephants, snakes, fire, water, thieves, false imprisonment and the demons that bring sickness. This is not a symbolic list. It is a working inventory of what could reasonably happen to a merchant between one town and the next: a forest burning upwind and the smoke coming down the valley, a river crossing that goes wrong, a stretch of road with men waiting on it, a foreign magistrate who does not believe your papers.

Painters gave the scheme a shape that has barely shifted in a thousand years. Tara sits large in the mouth of a cave in a green hillside, her lotus held up by two serpent deities, elephants and other animals moving through heavy vegetation below her while small saintly figures pick their way through a forest full of predators above. Down each side of the picture run eight more caves with eight more Taras in them, and in every single one she is leaning slightly out towards somebody in trouble with her hand already open.

The cult reached Tibet in the person of one man. Atisha, the Bengali master who came north in 1042 and stayed until his death in 1054, kept Tara as his tutelary deity, and said that he pictured her even in dreams as a mother. Asked once where she actually was, he pointed at a painting of the Eight Fears Tara hanging at Reting and said she was in that one. He and his Tibetan disciple Naktso put Chandragomin’s text into Tibetan. An abbot of Reting, Jangchub Rinchen, was sent all the way back to India to have another Eight Fears painting made and brought it home for Atisha to consecrate. Reting became the seat of the Kadam order, sixty kilometres north of Lhasa. The oldest temple built for her that still stands, Drolma Lhakhang, went up in that same eleventh century and keeps its original set of gilt Twenty-One Taras.

Tibet then did to her what traditions do to gods worth keeping: it wrote her backwards into its own history. Songtsen Gampo, the seventh-century king, had two foreign wives, a Chinese princess and a Nepalese one, and both were declared incarnations of Tara, White and Green in that order. The identification is not contemporary with the king; it is a later Tibetan reading of a dynasty already centuries dead. It worked. From that point she was not an Indian import but a Tibetan mother, present in every pious woman in the country.

She also multiplied. White Tara took the fully opened lotus, the long-life practices, and extra eyes, one in the forehead and one in each palm and sole, seven altogether, the form Mongolia has always liked best. Twenty-one Taras in white and red and yellow range around a green centre on temple banners, and the count of her forms eventually settled at a traditional hundred and eight. Furious and dark blue, invoked against enemies, she is Ugra-Tara or Ekajata. Red, and concerned with love, she is Kurukulla. Against snakebite she is Janguli. Yellow Bhrikuti is Tara with her brows pulled down. In most of these the buddha Amitabha, whose emanation she is, sits small in her headdress like a maker’s mark. A goddess called Tara stands among the ten Mahavidyas of Shakta Hinduism as well, fierce and at home in cremation grounds; the two share a name and a good deal of history and are not the same figure.

Her power is, before anything else, speed. She is the one you call when there is no time to arrange a proper rite, and the calling is the whole mechanism: the name, the mantra, the hand held out. She removes obstacles, grants long life and health, and carries the dying across the same way she carries the traveller. Her limits come out of the same vow that made her. She does not empty the forest of lions or take the river down to a safe depth; the eight fears stay exactly where they are, and what she offers is passage through them rather than their abolition. She has to be asked. And she has tied up her own ending: having sworn to labour in a woman’s body until suffering runs out, she cannot set the work down while anything anywhere is still suffering. Her liberation waits on everyone else’s. That is the arrangement she asked for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tara in Buddhism?

Tara is a Buddhist saviour goddess, worshipped as a bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism and as a fully enlightened buddha and mother of all buddhas in the Vajrayana traditions. She is closely associated with Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, and in the best-known origin story she was born from a tear he shed over the suffering of the world. Her name carries the senses of both “star” and “she who ferries across,” and her defining function is rescue.

What is the difference between Green Tara and White Tara?

Green Tara and White Tara are the two principal forms of the goddess and are distinguished by colour, lotus and function. Green Tara holds the closed blue utpala lotus, is the consort of the buddha Amoghasiddhi, and is regarded by some as the original form; she is the swift remover of obstacles and dangers. White Tara holds the fully opened lotus, is associated with purity, health and long life, and is often shown with seven eyes, one in her forehead and one in each palm and the sole of each foot.

What are the eight great fears that Tara protects against?

The eight great fears are lions, elephants, snakes, fire, water, thieves, false imprisonment and disease-bringing demons. They were set out by the seventh-century Indian philosopher Chandragomin and correspond to the real hazards facing medieval travellers on the Indian roads, which is why merchants, pilgrims and mariners in particular took Tara as their patron. In this form she is called Ashtamahabhaya Tara, and paintings show her surrounded by eight smaller versions of herself, each reaching out to a person in danger.

Why did Tara vow to be reborn as a woman?

According to the account written down by the Tibetan historian Taranatha in 1604, Tara had been a princess named Jnanachandra, or Yeshe Dawa, who was told by monks to pray for rebirth in a male body so that she could complete the path to enlightenment. She rejected the advice, arguing that the distinction between male and female is a product of confused thinking and that the idea of a female body as an obstacle was the real obstacle. She then vowed to work for the liberation of all beings in a female form for as long as suffering lasted, and attained enlightenment as Tara.

Is the Buddhist Tara the same as the Hindu goddess Tara?

No. A goddess named Tara also appears in Shakta Hinduism as one of the ten Mahavidyas, a fierce form of the Great Goddess linked with cremation grounds. She shares a name and a certain amount of shared history with the Buddhist Tara, since both rose to prominence in the same centuries and the same regions of India, but they are separate figures with separate cults, iconographies and texts.

Related Entries

Avalokiteśvara, Guan Yin, Amitabha, Manjushri, Vajrapani, Bodhisattvas, Buddha, Palden Lhamo, Mahakala, Dakini, Naga, Devi, Durga, Kali, Lakhsmi