The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
heart and motive power of the ritual are always the contemplation
of the deity, whether the practitioner is generating himself as the
goddess, evoking her before him, or projecting her into an object.
If contemplation is the heart of the ritual, then visualizaton is its
living soul. The ability to form a vivid picture of the deity being
contemplated in the ritual is the basis for all the uses to which the
ritual is put and the foundation of all employment of the deity in
her functions, whether to prevent hailstorms or to gain enlightenment:
it is the means by which the power of the deity can be
directed and the forces in the universe given shape. The ability to
control "appearances" is the affirmation of the practitioner's control
of reality itself. This point is worth repeating: in a universe where
all events dissolve ontologically into Emptiness, the touching of
Emptiness in the ritual is the re-creation of the world in actuality;
where solid reality is but a fabric of constructions, the deity's ritual
gestation and birth are no mere imitation of her primal genesis,
but the concrete formation of a symbolically potent reality.
How have I laboured?
How have I not laboured
To bring her soul to birth,
To give these elements a name and a centre!
She is beautiful as the sunlight, and as fluid.
She has no name, and no place.
How have I laboured to bring her soul into separation;
To give her a name and her being 1
—Ezra Pound, Ortus
Vivid appearance
The final goals of this visualization are in general subsumed under
three heads: vivid appearance, pride or ego, and recc'lection of
purity. As one informant put it, the first is a clear mental picture,
the second is one's identification with the picture, and the third is
the understanding of the meaning of the picture. In one of his texts
Tsongk'apa gives clear instructions for achieving the vivid appearance
which is the basis for both the others. The practitioner first
m u s t c
°ntemplate the sequence of formation—the Process of Generation
as given in the text of the particular ritual—until the deity
complete; but if the deity has many heads and many hands, the
Practitioner must begin by concentrating on the main face and the
0
main hands, leaving the other faces and hands as a uniform
agueness. He should make vivid in a rough way the parts of the
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