The Cult of Tara

xii PREFACE
ings and photographs." 4
This is, in essence, what I have tried to
do, and I have further attempted to throw light on the basic ritual
structures that underlie the relatively few rituals with which I deal,
hoping that these patterns may be extended and used as formulas
in the interpretation of other Tibetan rituals.
The problem of organization remains. This paper began originally
as a history of the goddess Tara, but once in the field I
found myself growing more and more engrossed in the actual practice
of Buddhist ritual as a study in itself; a scholar from our secular
society, I discovered, may too easily ignore the fact that Buddhism
is basically a performing art. Still, the cult that centers on
this goddess provided an organizational nucleus around which my
paper could be written, limiting my choice of ritual material to a
bulk none the less intimidating but at least yielding a hope of manageability.
Thus, too, the primarily Indian historical problems with which I
had originally intended to deal seemed, finally, irrelevant to the
main point of the paper, and these researches I plan to cover in a
separate article. For the historical problems involved, the reader
may refer to the works by Tucci 6
and Shastri,* to the textual
studies published sporadically since the late nineteenth century, 7
and to the articles collected under the aegis of a seminar on Tara
held at the University of Calcutta in 1965, these last being of the
most dizzyingly varied quality. 8
Further, there are many iconographic questions I studiously ignore:
the various Sanskrit anthologies of "evocations" contain
numerous descriptions of deities who are almost totally unimportant
in Tibet, which the original editors and their Tibetan translators
included for the sake of simple comprehensiveness; this indiscriminate
approach was then copied by the Tibetans themselves,
and it has been faithfully followed by many Western scholars in
their iconographic handbooks. All these anthologies tend to sacrifice
implicit information as to relative importance rather than quit
their quest for all-inclusiveness, reminding us of our own overstuffed
anthologies of English poetry; we might paraphrase a piece
of doggerel from e. e. cummings:
mr u will not be missed
who as an anthologist
sold the many to the few
not excluding mr u