The Cult of Tara

146
MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
for the empowerment of speech. Thus, for example, the famous
verse called the "heart of conditioned coproduction" reads as follows:
YE DHARMA HETU-PRABHAVA HETUN TESAM TATHA-
GATO AHA / TESAM CA YO NIRODHO EVAM VADL MA-
HASRAMANAH /
Whatever events arise from a cause,
the Tathagata has told the cause thereof;
and the great ascetic also
has taught their cessation as well.
This formula is used, as a mantra, for consecration, making firm a
deity generated within an object, or fixing a ritual act. Similarly,
the following anomolous mantra is used in the offering of tormas:
OM A-KARO MUKHAM SARVA-DHARMANAM ADY-ANUT-
PANNATVAT!
"OM The syllable A is first, because of the primordial nonarising
of all events I"
The visualization of the offerings is also accompanied by ritual
hand gestures, as indeed are most of the important acts of the ceremony.
For some reason these gestures have not received the scholarly
attention that has been lavished upon the mantras, or else they
have been confused with the iconographic gestures that serve to
identify paintings and images. We may distinguish two functional
categories of ritual hand gestures. The first, comparatively few,
are stereotyped gestures of reverence, threat, welcome, or farewell:
the practitioner may join his palms in reverence, hold out his extended
palms in a typically Tibetan gesture of good-bye, or cross
his arms over his chest to indicate the absorption of the deity
within him. The second category includes the ritual hand gestures
that accompany the presentation of offerings, and these are explicitly
intended as mimetic representations of the objects being
offered—simulacra that control the transmission of worship to the
god, just as the mantras of offering enjoin its acceptance and response.
A wide variety of offerings are visualized in the rituals and thus
dispatched to the deity with sound and gesture; these are generally
subsumed under the headings of "outer offerings," "inner offerings,"
and "secret offerings," to which is added in some rituals an "offering
of the Truth."