The Cult of Tara

230 MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
Entering upon the road linking and bending through mountains,
through ravines and valleys, I see you; and wandering the road
I think of Tara, greater than the strength of serpents,
and thus is their poison conquered and turned back upon them.
Entering upon the road where robbers
bear aloft their weapons,
I think of them trampled beneath the feet of Tara,
and with that power I go swiftly and joyfully to my home.
A man wise in daily prayer, bound captive in prison
by all the lords of this earth,
need but think of the feet of Tara
and instantly bursts his bonds in a hundred pieces.
Though the seas rise clamorously upward
as high as the Abode of Brahma, your body,
the terror of sea monsters, is as a boat in the midst thereof;
by thinking of Tara I lose all fear.
A vampire, his body brown-haired, dark as collyrium,
bound by his very sinews to hunger and thirst,
delighting in the slaughter of men:
even he is conquered by the thought of your feet.
As part of a recurring Buddhist iconographic process, each of these
eight terrors was assigned its own Tara, and the depiction of the
eight Taras became a popular theme for Indian artists, 4
a tradition
continued in Tibet where the painters relished the chance to fill
their canvases with delightful drawings of elephants, lions, and
threatened caravans. On one Indian image of this goddess, for example,
originally from Ratnagiri in Orissa, are depicted miniature
scenes of the eight great terrors, in which the person in danger in
each instance prays to a miniature replica of the goddess shown above.
The eight great terrors depicted in the relief are terror of drowning,
of thieves, of lions, of snakes, of fire, of spirits, of captivity, and of
elephants. 5
Another representation of the eight terrors is shown in
Tucci's Tibetan Painted Scrolls:' six figures below, and two more on
a level with the shoulders of the goddess, signify her forms invoked
by devotees to ward off the terrors; the goddess, always with the
same gesture, touches with her right hand the head of the man who
has run to her for aid. Behind her are the symbols of the terrors:
the elephant, the lion, the demon, in the lively folk style common to
this theme.