The Cult of Tara

WORS HIP 11
almost impossible to say whether during this period of the earlier
spread of the Law the cult of Tara took root in Tibet at all, or
whether it exerted any influence outside court or scholarly circles;
there certainly seems to be little evidence that the great mass of
people in Tibet ever heard of Tara. Repachen, the last of the great
"Righteous Kings" (assassinated in 836), 33
in the same edict that
sponsored the compilation of the Sanskrit-Tibetan vade mecum
Mahavyutpatti, decreed that "secret charms were not to be translated";
34
and the dark ages that followed upon the great persecution
by the apostate King Langdarma (beginning probably ca. 840) 35
deprive us of any information beyond that.
THE LATER SPREAD OF THE LAW
It is thus perhaps justly recorded that it was the great Atlsa, the
"venerable master" Dlpamkarasrljnana, arriving at Ngari in 1042 36
who brought the cult of Tara to Tibet, despite the prior existence
there of texts and images. "From the time he was a child," writes
Sumpa k'enpo, "he was preserved by Tara, the patron deity of his
former lives." 37
Atlsa's life was filled with visions of the goddess;
when he was young, she induced him to leave behind thoughts of
royal power and seek a teacher in another country. 38
It was the
goddess who persuaded him to go to Tibet, in spite of his advanced
age: "And when Atlsa asked Tara, she prophesied: 'If you go, your
life will be shortened; but you will advance the teachings and
benefit many beings, and chief among them a certain devotee.' And
so he agreed." 39
The "certain devotee" was Atlsa's chief disciple,
Jewe jungne, the Teacher from the Clan of Drom; the temple he built
for Tara still exists in Nyet'ang. 40
It must have been Atlsa's personal devotion to the goddess—an
enthusiasm that seems to have been caught by almost everyone he
met—which more than anything else provided the impetus for her
cult in Tibet, for he himself did not devote an inordinate amount of
effort to the composition of texts dealing with her: out of his total
of 117 works, only four are devoted specifically to Tara. On these
four, however, was built almost the entire structure of her Tibetan
cult, and they include one of the most popular of her hymns, which is
inserted somewhere in almost every one of her rituals. Atlsa wrote
an evocation of White Tara, based on the tradition of Vagisvaraklrti,
and two evocations of Green Tara; these works established the