Tara, the Buddhist saviour: who she is and where to find her in India

Tara means “one who causes to cross”, and the same word also means “star”, since stars cross the sky.

She appears in many forms, told apart above all by colour.

• Green Tara: the main form, associated with peace and enlightened activity. The other twenty-one forms are said to arise from her.
• White Tara: maternal compassion, healing and long life. She is drawn with seven eyes: one in the forehead and one in each palm and sole, which is why she is also called “Seven-eyed”.
• The twenty-one Taras: emanations of Green Tara in different colours, holding different implements for different work, from calming to wrathful protection. The hymn that names them, the Praises to the Twenty-One Taras, is well known in Tibet and recited by children and adults alike.

Rather than ranking the forms by power, the tradition gives each colour its own kind of activity: white for pacifying, red for power and magnetising, the wrathful forms for removing obstacles.

Tara is now so closely tied to Tibet that her Indian beginnings are easy to forget. Scholars agree her worship became popular in India during the 6th century; finds at Nalanda show her cult established by then. Among the earliest images that can be identified as Tara are reliefs in Cave 90 at Kanheri, in the forested hills of today’s Mumbai (6th century), and in Cave 6 at Ellora (around the 7th century). Under the Pala kings of eastern India, from the 8th century, she was firmly established.

The teacher Atisha (982–1054) was devoted to her and composed a praise to her and three Tara sadhanas (practice texts). Images of Tara have also been found in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Hinduism knows a Tara too, one of the ten Mahavidyas, the “great wisdom” goddesses of the Shakta tradition. That dark, fierce form, Ugra Tara, entered Hindu tantra from Buddhist sources, drawn from texts such as the Sadhanamala, and she remains important in the Shakta traditions.

Tara stands on the altar of Tibetan gompas, usually as the green figure with one foot stepping off the lotus, so the places linked above are simply good ones to start. Mindrolling in Dehradun is a large working Nyingma monastery with a Great Stupa about 56 metres high, free to enter. The Shedup Choepelling temple in Mussoorie’s Happy Valley was raised by Tibetan refugees in the early 1960s, among the first Tibetan shrines built in exile, close to where the Dalai Lama first stayed in 1959. Dhakpo Shedrupling at Kais, about 12 km from Naggar in the Kullu valley, is a monastic college of around 180 monks, opened in 2005 and rarely on anyone’s itinerary.

In the tradition, monks chant her twenty-one praises in the morning, before breakfast. Shoes off at the hall door, quiet during prayers, and ask before photographing monks. For the wider Buddhist story, see the Buddha and Padmasambhava.