The Cult of Tara

APPLICATION'
And Nagarjuna again comments: 33
In contemplating the Blessed Lady, most people let themselves
be diverted—"damaged"—by the women they obtain thereby
But if one is not turned away by temptation . . . then one is freed
forever from birth, old age, and death; one goes to the Pure Lands
of the great magicians and sees the Tathagatas, and one gains all
the stages of the Bodhisattva.
And thus one's magic power and control are made complete by the
plunge into the divine Emptiness, the very source of the nonreality
of this world.
We may, finally, summarize the relationship between the magical
attainments and the functions as in the following diagram.
function
soteriologicaL
ritual
magical
general-
magical attainment
extraordinary
Tower
middle
upper
THE STRUCTURE OF FUNCTION
-ordinary
We have already noted how these functions tend to group themselves
according to the locus of the "generation" and to the particular
mantra ritual that is used therein. The Tibetans themselves distinguish
three types of generation: self-generation, generation in front,
and generation in the flask. This last generation is the empowering
of the water that will be used in an initiation ceremony; the water is
rendered potent by the visualization of the deity within the flask
and the application of the mantra. Hence—though the Tibetans
have no single general rubric for this—the term may well serve for
all the times when the deity is generated within an object, since the
ritual process is the same. We may thus draw up the following
explicit correspondences:
mantra generation ritual element function
contemplation self ritual service soteriological
effectuation front evocation ritual
application flask employment magical
(object)