The Cult of Tara

236 MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
engaging itself from the person of the goddess, and it is effective
independently of her personal intervention. Indeed, beyond the
proven effectiveness of its recitation, her mantra may also simply
be written out and hung up, or carved upon a rock, that it may of
itself provide continual protection for that place:
There were once five hundred monks of the Little Vehicle who
all saw, every day, a mob of demons in the form of lions and
lionesses coming at them from the sky. They were all greatly
terrified, madly and wildly frightened, and they all fell prostrate.
But among them there was one monk who knew the miraculous
virtues of Tara; he wrote out her mantra and hung it up everywhere
in the grove, and immediately the visions stopped.
THE THEME OF THE MIRACULOUS IMAGE
In many of these stories we find that images of Tara were carved
into rock, and tales were told of their miraculous potency:
A head monk once suffered from the disease called "falling
brows." There had already been five monks who had caught the
disease, in which the flesh falls off and the brows are stripped,
and there was no way to control it. People did not dare to approach
him, lest they too catch it. On the road to beg alms, he
saw that on a great rock had been carved Tara's mantra and an
image of Tara (see pi. 4). He knelt down weeping and implored
her to save him. From the hand of the stone image there suddenly
flowed a liquid that was like medicine. He took it and washed
with it, and the disease was cured; and he was adorned with all
the signs of a god.
In India there was once a poor man who was in the very depths
of poverty. He saw that upon a rock there was an image of Tara,
and he knelt down and beseeched her. Suddenly the image pointed
toward a shrine. He dug where she had indicated, and he found a
jar filled with jewels, so that he became very rich. Now this man
responded and took to himself seven generations of the poor, so
that for seven generations poverty disappeared, and in birth after
birth he lived to be a rich old man.
In the northeast of India was a place where the monks would
draw water, and at this place was an image of Tara carved on a
rock. But here lived monks who practiced the Little Vehicle; and
when they saw any scriptures of the Great Vehicle they took and
burned them. The king was enraged when he heard that they
so deeply hated the Tantra that, like enemies, they destroyed its
images, and he wished to kill them. He sent men to apprehend