The Cult of Tara

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MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
power, her contact with the ultimate potency of enlightenment, her
literal "touching" of omnipotent Emptiness. All their deities are
centers of this power, which is impelled into the present by such
primordial vows, which is fed by the deities' own meditation, and
which is given its final form and direction (in re-creation of its
primal genesis) by a ritual. It is, ultimately, this cosmic power that
is symbolized by the multitudinous arms and weapons and by the
sexual embraces of the highest deities; and it is this power that the
practitioner forms "from the realm of Emptiness" by the Process of
Generation.
TWO WAYS OF APPROACH
The Tibetans make a broad distinction between two'types of ritual
approach to the utilization of this divine and primordial power.
In a ritual of evocation, through the process of self-generation, the
practitioner first applies the Process of Generation to himself: he
vividly visualizes himself as the deity and grasps the divine pride or
ego; he directs the power of the deity into himself and becomes, in
effect, the transformer through which the divine power can pass out
of the realm of knowledge and into the world of events. Thus he
next generates or evokes the same deity (occasionally, a different
deity) in front of him by the same Process of Generation—placing
the power in the sky or within an object (a flask of pure water, say,
or an amulet of protection)-—and finally directs it into a ritual
function or magical employment; he consciously manipulates and
conducts it into an activity, into a magical device, or even, as in the
betsowing of initiations, into another person. An ordinary nondivine
human body, I was told, simply could not stand the pressure.
Although we note in the myths of her origin how Tara shares in
the basic potency of the divine, how little true personality she has
when compared with Hindu or Greek deities, here too the attitude
of worship strives to break through the wall of inhuman power, of
"otherness," which surrounds her. The Four Mandalas are a ritua!
of offering rather than of evocation: here there is no self-generation,
no manipulation of her power through the person of the practitioner.
There is no contemplation of the mantra in the practitioner's own
heart during self-generation, but rather the effectuation of the
mantra in the deity's heart generated "in front": the nexus of power
which is the deity is given iconographic form by the ritual Process