The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
public nonreality, and the victim, like the effigy, is converted from
inaccessible object to malleable image. (3) Finally these images—the
"real-ization" and the coalescence of the two objects—are bound
into a unity, an image/object to be manipulated in any way the
yogin may wish; this unity of contemplative "appearance and
Emptiness" thus exists in two realms simultaneously, to produce its
effects in bifurcated nonreality.
The ritual Process of Generation similarly takes the divine power
as object, to be controlled in and through its vivid image, and to
sanctify this new reality with its appearance; it manifests itself as
the blossoming of the seed syllable after the "construed and fabricated"
universe is dissolved into Emptiness by the mantra, and it
unfolds in four stages:
1) The divine power is given form and shape as the symbolic
being, the projection upon the ultimate fabric of reality of the
practitioner's own visualization; this is, in the words of Tsongk'apa
"the body of the deity adorned with faces and hands, whose real
nature is as an 'appearance' of one's own mind, a making vivid of
one's ordinary ego." 154
2) It empowers the senses of the visualized deity, radiating forth
upon it as the power of body, speech, and mind, crystallizing as the
syllables OM AH HUM on head, throat, and heart; in more complex
rituals, this may include any of the different sorts of "body mandala,"
the "deep contemplation of the subtle deities" which fills the
body of the visualization—its senses, "aggregates," organs, and
orifices—with the entire divine host of the mandala, and may
further "put on armor" of still more empowering deities.
3) Into the receptacle thus prepared for it, the divine power
descends in actuality from its natural abode of the Dharma realm,
compelled by the visualization of its appearance and often greeted
with offerings and praise; this is the "real" deity, the knowledge
being, who is dissolved into the symbolic being with the four hand
gestures in figure 14 and the mantra J AH HUM BAM HOH to summon,
absorb, bind, and dissolve it therein: and at this very instant
the yogin casts off his ordinary ego and grasps the ego of the god.
If one makes the knowledge being enter in," says Tsongk'apa, "his
e
yes and so on are mixed inseparably with the eyes and so on of the
s
ymbolic being, down to their very atoms: and one should firmly
dualize their total equality." 155
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