The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP
not in any Buddhist manual of worship but, perhaps even more
valuable because independent, in a pun provided by the illustrious
Sanskrit author Subandhu in his romance Vasavadatta, 12
a source
not previously adduced, as far as I know, in any discussion of the
problem. In this long prose poem we find the following play on
words: bhiksuki 'va tardnuragaraktdmbaradhdrini bhagavati samdhya
samadrsyata "The Lady Twilight was seen, devoted to the
stars and clad in red sky, as a Buddhist nun [is devoted to Tara and
is clad in red garments]."
The pun centers on the ambivalence of two words: tara as either
"star" or "Tara," and ambara as either "sky" or "garment." This
sort of pun is perhaps the foremost embellishment of Subandhu's
work; indeed, he himself says that he is a "storehouse of cleverness
in the composition of works in which there is a pun in every syllable."
13
In his handbook of poetics, the Kdvyddarsa, the theoretician
and author Dandin defines "pun" as follows [2.310]: "We consider
a 'pun' to be a speech of a single form but of many meanings." And
he says further [2.363]:
The pun, as a rule, enhances the beauty in all ambiguous statements:
the speech is divided into two parts, the inherent statement
[the "manifest content"] and the ambiguous statement [the "latent
content"].
Examples of this rhetorical adornment abound in Subandhu's romance,
and they are usually intimated, as in the present instance,
by (Va; selection could be made ad nauseam, but perhaps it will be sufficient,
to demonstrate that the present instance is indeed a pun on
Tara's name, if we give a few more examples from the whole series of
puns Subandhu uses, as he did this one, to describe the Lady Twilight:
varayosid iva pallavdnurakta "reddened with blossoms, as a courtesan
[is devoted to her lover]," kdmini 'va kaleydtamrapayodhara "having
vermilion clouds, as a beautiful woman [has breasts reddened with saffron]."
Or again, to show the play on proper names: vanarasenam iva
sugrivdhgadopasobhita "adorned with a beautiful throat and bracelets,
as the army of monkeys [was adorned with Sugrlva and Ahgada],
This pun raises certain problems: bhiksuki is not necessarily a
Buddhist nun, and tara may refer to Lady Star, the wife of Brhaspati;
but it would be curious, after all, to find a nun of any order
being devoted to the stellar heroine of a minor epic episode, the
wife of Jupiter stolen by the Moon. 14
If we do accept that Subandhu
was making a pun on the name of a Buddhist goddess before what