Tara Buddhism: Encyclopedia II - Tara Buddhism - Tara as a Tantric Deity

Tara Buddhism - Tara as a Tantric Deity

Tara as a focus for tantric deity yoga can be traced back to the time period of Padmasambhava. There is a Red Tara practice which was given by Padmasambhava to Yeshe Tsogyal. He asked that she hide it as a treasure. It was not until this century, that a great Nyingma Lama, Apong Terton rediscovered it. This Lama was reborn as His Holiness Sakya Trizin, present head of the Sakyapa sect. A monk who had known Apong Terton succeeded in retransmitting it to H.H. Sakya Trizin, and the same monk also gave it to Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, who released it to his western students.

Martin Willson in In Praise of Tara traces many different lineages of Tara Tantras, that is Tara scriptures used as Tantric sadhanas. For example a Tara sadhana was revealed to Tilopa,(988-1069 C.E.) the human father of the Karma Kagyu. Atisa the great translator and founder of the Kadampa school of Tibetan Buddhism, was a devotee of Tara. He composed a praise to her, and three Tara Sadhanas. Martin Willson's work also contains charts which show origins of her tantras in various lineages, but suffice to say that Tara as a tantric practice quickly spread from around the 7th century C.E. onwards, and remains an important part of Vajrayana Buddhism to this day.

The practices themselves usually present Tara as a tutelary deity (thug dam, yidam) which the practitioners sees as being a latent aspect of one's mind, or a manifestation in a visible form of a quality stemming from BuddhaJnana. As John Blofeld puts it in his The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet:

"The function of the Yidam is one of the profound mysteries of the Vajrayana... Especially during the first years of practice the Yidam is of immense importance. Yidam is the Tibetan rendering of the Sanskrit word Istadeva-the indwelling deity; but, where the Hindus take the Istadeva for an actual deity who has been invited to dwell in the devotee's heart, the Yidams of Tantric Buddhism are in fact the emanations of the adepts own mind. Or are they? To some extent they seem to belong to that order of phenomena which in Jungian terms are called archetypes and are therefore the common property of the entire human race. Even among Tantric Buddhists, there may be a division of opinion as to how far the Yidams are the creations of individual minds. What is quite certain is that they are not independently existing gods and goddesses; and yet, paradoxically, there are many occasions when they must be so regarded."

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Tara as a Tantric Deity", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki