The Cult of Tara

80 MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
Recollection of Purity
A practitioner who can thus form, at will, these special appearances
and special ego is in conscious control of both his external and
internal reality: the world he lives in is one of his own choosing, one
that he owns. There is a further contemplative exercise to reinforce
the symbolic potency of this new reality, called the "recollection of
purity," which is a meditation upon the implicit meaning of the
divine image the practitioner has vividly visualized and upon the
ontological values of his new identity. In some contemplative rituals
the recollection of purity is performed immediately after the
vivid appearance and before the exchange of egos, while in others
it is performed last of the three. The symbolic interpretations of
the deity whom the practitioner has become are often rather farfetched
and obviously after the fact; and the same interpretations
are often applied to different deities, since Buddhist philosophy is
so fond of numerical lists that it can easily provide a meaning for
anything that can be enumerated. But the contemplative exercise
is an antidote to any reification of the visualized deity; the practitioner
is reminded that he has become not a thing but an expression,
that his new set of appearances, ontologically just as false or as real
as his old set, is at least meaningful symbolically in a way that his old
reality, "fabricated and construed," could not have been, and he is
provided by its very artificiality with a clue to the source of all
appearances and a mechanism for understanding their genesis. Thus
it is a recollection of purity: the visualization is pure of any construct
of reality imposed upon it, just as all the events of his ordinary
appearances were pure, could they have been understood as the
"Innate Union of appearance and Emptiness." Every alternate
reality—ordinary or divine—is meaningful only insofar as it is
Empty; otherwise there could be no interpenetration of meaning,
and hence there could be no magic.
As an example of this type of meditation, Nagarjuna gives the
following "explanation of the complete purity of the visualization": 11
'
The single face of the Chief Lady is the understanding of all events
as a single knowledge. The green color of her body is power in
all functions. Her two hands are the understanding of the two
truths: her right hand the conventional truth, her left hand the
absolute truth. Her right foot stretched out is the abandonment
of all the defects of Mara; her left foot drawn back is the understanding
of all qualities. Her adornment with all ornaments is the