The Praises to the Twenty-One Taras is a hymn of twenty-one verses, each addressing a different form of the bodhisattva Tara, chanted daily by Tibetan Buddhist lay people and monastics, often three or seven times in succession. Its Sanskrit source is attested from around the eighth century, and the praise is embedded in Tibetan liturgy of every kind. Each verse evokes a distinct manifestation, swift and heroic, peaceful, wrathful, granting long life, dispelling particular fears, so that the single goddess is approached through a spectrum of her powers and moods.
Tara is the great figure of active compassion in Tibetan Buddhism, invoked above all for protection from fear and danger, and the twenty-one forms give devotion a structured range: the practitioner does not address an abstraction but a series of vivid, specific presences, each with its colour, gesture and function. The hymn is short enough to be held in memory and is woven into daily practice, at the start of the day and at moments of need, which has made it one of the most familiar of all Tibetan liturgical texts. It exemplifies a Vajrayana pattern in which the manifold forms of a deity are enumerated not to multiply gods but to give the imagination concrete holds on a single compassionate reality.