The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
the morning assembly, among the long series of rituals evoking the
patron deities, every Kajii monastery inserts a short Four Mandala
Offering, a hidden text of the goddess which had been revealed in
contemplation. 37
K'amgargon supported a Tara temple where there
was performed throughout the day the long Four Mandala Offering
to be considered later in this chapter. But the goddess has no
great monastic rituals or dances; her special rituals of protection
and life are enacted in the monastery or the house of a devotee only
upon the request of an individual, monk or lay, who endows their
performance as a thanks offering or when an emergency arises. The
protection of the monastery is in the hands of the Protectors and the
fierce patron deities; for an "initiation into life" there is available
the full-fledged Buddha Arnitayus and his mandala of nine deities, 88
or the "three deities of life" whom he heads and of whom White
Tara is but a subsidiary member. 88
Indeed, for any of the rituals
considered here there are deities more ferocious, more visibly potent,
and more profound in symbolic associations than Tara.
To her devotees, however, Tara is an abiding deity, her constant
availability perhaps best symbolized by the daily repetition of her
ritual rather than by any great ceremony taking place only once a
year; I have seldom seen a personal altar, monk or lay, without
her picture prominently displayed somewhere, though it may be
surrounded by a host of representations of other deities. She is a
patron deity in a second sense of the word, a personal deity rather
than a monastic patron, a mother to whom her devotees can take
their sorrows and on whom they can rely for help; she might appear
before one in a dream or bestow other tangible signs of her favor,
and many stories are told of her miraculous and spontaneous intervention
in the lives of those who follow her. The popular cult of the
goddess is one of trust and reverence, of self-confident reliance upon
the saving capacity of the divine and upon the human capacity to
set in motion the divine mechanism of protection.
THE POPULAR CULT: DRAMA
This cult is promulgated and its premises are sustained not only
by an informal folktale tradition (examined in chap, ii) but also by
a more formalized tradition of native drama, where wandering
troupes of actors perform indigenous tales of Tara's patronage.
Indeed, one of the most popular of these masked folk dramas in
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