The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
and on the lowest row (nearly hidden by the offering bowls which
represent the two waters and five gifts) the gift tormas for the guests.
The day before the actual performance of the ritual is spent in the
preparation of the altar—the "arraying of ornaments"—and the
hanging of painted scrolls on the walls, the filling of butter lamps,
the picking of flowers, and the molding of the tormas. These are
made from zen—barley flour mixed with water, with perhaps some
butter added to give body—and their adornments are made of
colored butter, kept cool in a pan of water and shaped with the fingers
into the form of flowers, often of the most astonishing delicacy.
As the sponsors of the ritual, we had to pay for all the material
necessary for these preparations: the butter for the lamps, the flour
for the tormas, the grain for filling the offering bowls, and so on
(the cost of the altar shown in plate 2 came to about $3.10). In
addition, the sponsor buys the tea that is served throughout the
ritual and, since on this' occasion the performance lasted all day,
lunch for the monastery as well (the food and tea for a monastery
of about fifty monks came to about $9.30). Finally, each monk
gets paid individually for his professional services; after some discussion
with the storekeeper, it was decided that each incarnate lama
was to be paid 5 rupees (about 60c), each yogin 3 rupees (about 40c),
and each ordinary monk, including the children, 2 rupees (about
27c). These amounts are by no means unreasonable, even by Indian
standards, yet the total of more than $20 for the ritual would make
a large and perhaps irremediable dent in almost any Tibetan pocket.
Aside from our scholarly interest in the performance of the ritual, we
felt that our sponsorship would be one means of thanking the monastery
and the lay community for their help; no Tibetan could ever
think of a better way, in religious or social terms, to spend his money.
The Four Mandalas are the unifying theme in this rather complex
ritual of offering; though the goddess is generated only once, in
front of the practitioners, the structure of the ritual may easily be
obscured by its wealth of detail. A basic outline of the ceremony, as
derived from the section headings in the text itself, may be helpful:
1 Preliminaries
1.1 Going for refuge, awakening the thought of enlightenment,
and contemplating the four immeasurables
1.2 Making the cleansing water potent
1.3 Therewith empowering the place and the utensils