The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
of Generation and vividly visualized before the practitioner, that
the goddess may be approached, her power tapped through her
mantra, and the "stream of her heart aroused" with offerings,
praises, and prayers.
Yet here, too, the same preparatory requirements are set up for
the performance of this ritual as for all others. It is not wholly true
to say that "the faithful may appeal to her directly without the
intermediary of a lama"; 96
rather it is better to say that her power—
born of her touching of Emptiness an impelled by her vows of love
—may manifest itself spontaneously in answer to the supplication
of a devotee, without the demands of conscious manipulation. But
when the deity is formed and approached in ritual and her power is
applied through the effectuation of her mantra, the performance
requires, as we have seen, the presence of monks whose vows are
unbroken, who have been duly initiated, and who have gone through
the prior ritual service of the goddess. "All the Tantras and all the
texts of the great magicians agree," says Yeshe jets'en, "in holding
that one must have attained the power to recite the mantra and to
perform the mantra rituals by being possessed of yoga—'union'—
with the deity: that is, the contemplation of oneself as the holy
Tara." 97
There is thus never a ritual of offering in isolation from the contemplative
preparation of self-generation: an offering is always the
delayed second half of an evocation, the first half of which was performed
perhaps years before as the prior ritual service of the deity.
This fact leads to some semantic level-switching: in a ritual of
evocation the self-generation is often called (by analogy with the
actual sequence of contemplative training) the "ritual service," and
the generation in front is then called the "evocation" proper. This
rather involuted terminology may perhaps be clarified by the
following table:
Generation Mantra Title Ritual approach
self contemplation ritual service <
+
f evocation
in front effectuation evocation offering J
Again we see the paradox of power controlling the functional
relationship between the lay and monastic communities, for the
necessity of prior ritual service, even for the worship of the deity,
limits access to the magical powers of the ritual, which are available
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