Tara

Tara is the most widely practised deity of Tibetan Buddhism after Avalokiteshvara, and the quality her devotees name first is speed. She is the one who answers quickly. Her name is connected with crossing over and with the star that guides, and she is addressed as a mother.

Her best-known form is Green Tara, seated with the right leg extended and the foot down on a small lotus, as though she is already rising to go. The posture is the doctrine: she is compassion in the act of moving, where Avalokiteshvara is compassion looking on. Her mantra, Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha, is recited for protection in travel, in illness and in fear, and is among the most commonly heard in the Himalaya. The Praises to the Twenty-One Taras is chanted daily in many households and monasteries, running through twenty-one aspects of her with their colours and functions.

She is said to have been born from a tear of Avalokiteshvara, shed when he saw that the suffering he was working to end was not diminishing. In another and more pointed account she is a princess named Yeshe Dawa who is told that her practice is admirable and that she should pray to be reborn male in order to progress, and who replies that in this form she has attained and in this form she will remain, and vows to appear only as a woman until samsara is emptied. The story is doing deliberate work.

White Tara is a distinct practice, associated with long life and healing, seated in full lotus, with seven eyes, one in each palm, one in each sole, one in the forehead, so that she watches in every direction at once. She is often practised together with Amitayus and Ushnishavijaya as the three deities of long life, on behalf of the sick and of teachers whose lives are wanted longer.

Where Tara comes from is not settled, and the popular account of it is usually backwards.

The dating evidence. The earliest textual reference is in the Manjusri-mula-kalpa, placed somewhere between the fifth and eighth centuries, which describes her as the compassion of Avalokitesvara. The earliest images are earlier than most of the texts: Kanheri cave 90 in the sixth century and Ellora cave 6 around the seventh. Her worship was established at Nalanda by the sixth century. So a cult existed in India by the sixth century and had reached a major monastic university.

The contested part. How she relates to earlier Indian goddesses is open. Mallar Ghosh proposed that she originated as a form of Durga. The general scholarly position is more cautious: her origin is unclear and remains a subject of inquiry. There is not even agreement on what to call her, and she is variously classified as a deity, a buddha and a bodhisattva. Miranda Shaw, in Buddhist Goddesses of India of 2006, argues that motherhood is central to the conception of Tara and reads her as reflecting Mahayana's openness to women practitioners in sixth-century India.

The borrowing that runs the other way. A Hindu Tara exists among the ten Mahavidyas of Shakta tantra, and the obvious inference, that the Buddhists took her from Hinduism as they took Mahakala and Hayagriva, is the wrong one in this case. The Hindu Ugra Tara or Mahacinakrama Tara is generally held to have been imported into Hindu tantra from Buddhist sources, and her very name, referring to the practice of Great China, points at where she was understood to have come from. Direction of borrowing has to be established case by case and cannot be inferred from which religion is larger.

There is also a persistent claim linking Tara to pre-Buddhist or Bon goddesses in Tibet. It is not established, and the atlas does not repeat it as fact.