The Cult of Tara

I
WORSHIP 59
I am an apparition [nang] for the benefit of beings;
over all the earth [sa] may there be grace and happiness,
may the light [6] of your power shine in all directions,
may a hundred thousand [bum] beings be established in the Law I
[Narrator:]
And as a name for their daughter, they abbreviated these verses
she had spoken; and all the people of the country, with a single
voice, declared the girl's name to the Nangsa obum.
THE POPULAR CULT: POETRY
The popular sentiments of devotion to the goddess also find expression
in the praises composed in her honor, as an exercise in reverence
or to commemorate her intervention on a devotee's behalf.
The colophon of one such praise, for example, tells that when the
author was staying in U, during the winter of the Water-Male-
Monkey year, there arose many omens of his approaching death; so
on the 15th of December he went to the Great Temple of the Four
Manifestations in Lhasa, 91
and there he prayed one-pointedly before
the miraculous talking image on the second story, joining to the
praises and prayer he had composed the mantra AMARA-AYUH-
SIDDHIR ASTU! "Let there be accomplished deathless life!"
which he repeated 108,000 times. That night he had a dream about
the time of dawn; in it he saw a young girl, who spoke quite clearly
the following verse:
If you visualize [the mantra] within your central channel
and perform diamond recitation 10,000 times,
you will surely avert untimely death . . .
As he awoke the last line faded away, and he could not remember it. 92
These praises are often of scant literary merit from the Western
point of view, being a collection of traditional epithets and a display
of pyrotechnic virtuosity in the handling of stock metaphors.
Frequently the verses are constructed upon an iconographic catalogue
of the deity, using more or less predictable similes for each of
her features, though even here poetic talent may be brought to
bear on the subject, as in the following stanzas from a hymn by the
fifth Dalai Lama: 93
Upon the orb of a moon in the center of the anthers
of a soft and tender lotus, its petals full blown,
the body of the goddess, sensuous, ravishing,
mother of all the Conquerors: there I direct my prayer.