The Cult of Tara

MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
The outer offerings are :all those things of the external world—animate
and inanimate—whiich are proper to the reception of a royal or
divine guest. The most basic of these, whose accompanying gestures
are illustrated in figure 15, are the two waters and the five gifts,
listed as follows with thteir Sanskrit names as given in their mantras:
1) ARGHAM '"oblation" or "water for the face"
2) PAD YAM '"water for the feet"
3) PUSPE "fhowers"
4) DHUPE "iincense"
5) ALOKE "humps"
6) GANDHE '"perfume"
7) NAIVEDY'E "food"
These offerings are represented upon the altar by seven bowls filled
with water and grain; amd to these seven is added
8) SABDA "imusic,"
which is not set out oni the altar, since it is supposed to be ommipresent
in the assembliy hall. Here the mimetic intention of the
gestures is not so apparent as it is in some of the other sets of offerings;
but note how gessture 5 represents the lamps being offered,
with the thumbs raised! in imitation of a wick rising from a pool of
butter, or how gesture 8 represents beating time to music.
We may remark thait the mantras that accompany these offerings
may appear to a Sanskritist to have undergone some rather
bizarre deformations. IBut many of these may be accounted for as
regular early Prakritic analogical assimilations (e.g., dative singular
RAJAYA for RAJSIE:) or as more or less well-attested Buddhist
Hybrid forms (e.g., vcocative singular GURU for GURO, present
imperative KHAHI ffor KHADA "eat!"). The two waters are
clearly accusative objetcts of the imperative PRATlCCHA "accept I"
but the five gifts—offten offered as a separate sequence—would
seem to be feminine ssingular vocatives (e.g., PUSPE "0 Lady of
the flowers I") addresssed to the goddesses who emanate from the
practitioner and makce offerings to the deity, stereotyped in the
mantra even when suich emanation is not given in the ritual text.
SABDA seems, anomialously, to be a masculine vocative singular,
parallel perhaps to rmantras of the form OM SUVARNA-CAKRA
PRATlCCHA "OM Giolden wheel: accept it 1"