Taraतारा

Tara is the second of the ten Mahavidyas, and the most quietly remarkable of them, because she is not only a Hindu goddess. A goddess of the same name, the same root and much of the same iconography is central to Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism from Tibet to Mongolia to Japan, and the two traditions have been borrowing from each other about her for well over a thousand years.

Her name comes from the Sanskrit root tṛ, to cross over. Tara is the one who ferries you across — across the ocean of worldly existence, across danger, across the moment you cannot get through by yourself. Both traditions agree on that much, and it is worth holding onto, because almost everything else about her looks different depending on which side you approach from. The Buddhist Tara is most often serene, green or white, and approached by anyone. The Hindu Tara of the Mahavidyas is Ugra Tara, the fierce one: blue-black, dwarfish and pot-bellied, laughing on a cremation ground, garlanded with severed heads, approached under initiation and not casually.

In the Shakta scheme she stands immediately after Kali and is understood as very close to her — so close that some texts treat the two as barely distinguishable, and the Mahanirvana Tantra names them together. The distinction usually drawn is one of function rather than temperament. Kali is time, which takes everything. Tara is the crossing, which is what you need when time has taken everything.

Her principal seat is Tarapith in Birbhum district, West Bengal, where the cremation ground and the temple are treated as a single site, and where the nineteenth-century ascetic Bamakhepa made her worship famous well beyond Bengal.

Tara's history is the clearest case in this encyclopedia of a deity moving between religions, and it is worth setting out honestly rather than smoothing over.

The Buddhist attestation is earlier and better dated. Tara appears in Buddhist texts and images from around the 6th century CE, is fully developed by the 8th, and is one of the most widely worshipped figures in Vajrayana Buddhism. The Sadhanamala, a Buddhist ritual compendium, describes forms — including a blue, fierce Ekajata — that are recognisably the ones the Hindu Tantras later use. The scholar Benoytosh Bhattacharyya, working on Buddhist iconography in the 1920s and after, argued from this that the Hindu Ugra Tara is a Buddhist import, and David Kinsley's later study of the Mahavidyas treats that as the most probable reading.

The Hindu tradition tells the same story from the inside. The Rudrayamala Tantra preserves an account in which the sage Vashishtha performs an austerity to Tara for years and gets nowhere. He is told — in most versions by Vishnu, appearing in the form of the Buddha — that her worship cannot be done by Vedic means, and that he must go to Mahachina, greater China, to learn it. There he finds the Buddha surrounded by practices that violate every purity rule he knows: meat, wine, women, no ritual bathing. He is scandalised, then instructed, and returns with Chinachara, the "Chinese practice", which is the Kaula method of worshipping her.

Read as history this story is not literally reliable, and "Mahachina" in it probably means Tibet or the Himalayan north rather than China proper. Read as memory it is unusually candid: the tradition is saying, in its own idiom, this worship came to us from outside, from Buddhists, and it broke our rules when it arrived.

The borrowing was not one-way. Buddhist Tantric Buddhism absorbed a great deal of Shaiva ritual grammar in the same centuries, and some scholars read Ekajata specifically as passing back and forth more than once. What can be said safely is that between roughly the 7th and 12th centuries, in eastern India, Nepal and Tibet, Buddhist and Shakta tantra were in continuous contact, and Tara is the figure on whom that contact is most legible.

Her establishment in Bengal and Assam is late-medieval and continues into the modern period. Tarapith's prominence owes a great deal to Bamakhepa (c. 1837–1911), an unconventional ascetic who lived at the cremation ground there; the temple's present fame is largely posthumous to him.

Tara's image is close enough to Kali's that they are confused, and the differences are precisely the interesting part.

She is blue-black — nila, the colour of deep water and of the poison she is said to have neutralised. Unlike Kali she is usually described as short, heavy and pot-bellied, standing in the aggressive pratyalidha posture with the right knee bent forward, on a corpse or on Shiva. She wears a tiger skin around the waist, a garland of severed heads, and snakes as ornaments. Her face laughs and is terrible at once; her tongue protrudes; her three eyes are red.

Two features are hers and not Kali's.

The first is the single matted braid — ekajata — coiled on top of her head, which is important enough to be one of her names. Where Kali's hair is loose and streaming, Tara's is bound into one. Practitioners read the loose hair as unbound power and the single braid as power gathered to one point and aimed.

The second is the small figure of Akshobhya seated in that braid. In the Buddhist reading he is the Tathagata Akshobhya, the "unshakeable", the Buddha of the mirror-like wisdom. In the Hindu reading he is Shiva, and the Tantras gloss the name as a-kshobhya, that which cannot be agitated. Both readings are current, they are argued about, and the figure is there either way — which is the point.

Her four hands hold the kartri, the crescent-bladed chopper used to flay; the kapala, the skull-bowl; the utpala, the blue lotus; and the khadga, the sword. Some forms substitute a pair of scissors for the chopper. The chopper and scissors are both instruments of severing, and the tradition reads them as cutting attachment rather than flesh — but they are also, plainly, the working tools of a cremation ground, and the imagery does not pretend otherwise.

She is described as youthful even while being fearsome, and often as standing amid flames on a white lotus risen from the water — the incongruity is deliberate.

Ugra Tara — "fierce Tara", the standard Mahavidya form and the one described above. This is the form of the Assamese Ugratara shrine in Guwahati and of most Bengali tantric practice.

Ekajata — "she of the single braid". Sometimes treated as a name of Ugra Tara, sometimes as a distinct and even fiercer form with one braid, one face and blue-black colour. Ekajata is also independently a Buddhist goddess, and this is the form where the two traditions are hardest to separate.

Nila Saraswati — "the blue Saraswati", and the most surprising of her forms. Here Tara is the goddess of speech: not the ordered, learned speech of the Vaishnava-Smarta Saraswati, but the word that arrives unbidden, the utterance that comes out of the practitioner rather than being composed by them. The Nila Tantra is built around this form. Poets and reciters invoke it, and it is the reason Tara is sometimes approached for eloquence — an association that would be baffling if one knew only her cremation-ground face.

These three are counted together as her principal aspects, and most Hindu texts on her describe them as one goddess under three names rather than as separate deities.

The Buddhist Taras, for contrast rather than as forms of the same worship: Green Tara, swift and protective, the most widely invoked; White Tara, associated with long life; and the set of twenty-one Taras enumerated in the Praise to the Twenty-One Taras. These belong to a different tradition with its own lineage and philosophy. The overlap of name and root is real; the assumption that a Buddhist practitioner and a Kaula practitioner are doing the same thing is not.

The poison and the nursing. The defining Hindu story of Tara attaches her to the churning of the ocean, Samudra Manthana. When the gods and asuras churn the cosmic ocean, the first thing to surface is not nectar but halahala, a poison so virulent it threatens every world. Shiva swallows it to save creation, and holds it in his throat — which is why he is Nilakantha, the blue-throated. In the version the Tara Tantra and later Bengali sources tell, the poison overcomes him even so, and he falls unconscious like a child.

The Goddess then appears as Tara and takes him on her lap and nurses him, and her milk neutralises what the poison has done. This is why the image at Tarapith is not the fierce cremation-ground Tara at all but Tara suckling Shiva, and why she is addressed there as mother in the most ordinary sense of the word.

The story is doing careful work. It places the fiercest goddess in the most tender possible posture, and it makes her the answer to a crisis that even Shiva's self-sacrifice could not finish. It also explains her colour: she is blue because the poison is.

Vashishtha and the journey to Mahachina. The Rudrayamala account described in the origins section is also a legend in its own right, and it is told as one. Vashishtha, a Vedic sage of impeccable standing, cannot reach Tara by Vedic means; he is sent to learn from the Buddha; he is offended by what he finds; and he is told that his offence is the obstacle. The story is one of the frankest statements in Sanskrit literature that ritual purity can itself be the thing standing in the way.

Bamakhepa. The most recent layer is historical rather than mythic. Bamakhepa — the name means roughly "the mad one of the left-hand path" — lived at the Tarapith cremation ground in the nineteenth century, ate from the offerings before they were offered, was beaten for it, and was defended by the goddess in a vision granted to the temple's patron. He is buried at the site and is worshipped alongside her. He belongs to the same Bengali generation as Ramakrishna, and the two are often discussed together.

Tara's worship is tantric, initiatory and largely nocturnal, and this needs saying plainly on a public page: the practices described in her Tantras are not domestic ones. They are transmitted by a teacher to an initiate, several of them are deliberately transgressive of caste and purity norms, and reading about them is not the same as being entitled to perform them.

What is public is the temple worship at Tarapith, and it is very public indeed. Pilgrims come year-round; the great occasion is Kaushiki Amavasya, the new moon of Bhadrapada (August–September), when the cremation ground fills with practitioners and the temple stays open through the night. Tara Jayanti falls on the ninth of the waxing fortnight of Chaitra. She is also worshipped through Navaratri, and with the other nine Mahavidyas during the Gupta Navaratris of Ashadha and Magha.

Offerings at Tarapith are not restricted in the Vaishnava manner. Meat and fish are offered, liquor is used in tantric worship, and goat sacrifice is still performed at the temple — a practice contested within Shaktism itself and increasingly substituted elsewhere with a pumpkin or gourd. Red hibiscus and red cloth are standard, as with Kali.

Her seed syllable is strīṃ, and the common mantra is ॐ ह्रीं स्त्रीं हुं फट्. The Tara Tantra and the Nila Tantra carry her principal liturgies; the Nila Saraswati Stotra is the text most often recited by those approaching her for speech and learning rather than for protection.

Her worship is strongest in West Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Nepal, and is comparatively rare in the south and west of India.

Tarapith, Birbhum, West Bengal — her principal seat, and one of the very few major Indian temples where the mahashmashan, the great cremation ground, is treated as part of the sacred complex rather than kept at a distance from it. The stone image inside shows Tara nursing Shiva; it is normally clothed and crowned so that only the silver face is visible, and pilgrims who expect the fierce iconography of the texts are often surprised. Bamakhepa's samadhi is on the grounds. Tarapith is counted locally as a Shakta Pitha, though it does not appear in the older canonical lists — a discrepancy worth knowing before repeating the claim.

Ugratara Temple, Guwahati, Assam — a significant shrine on the Jor Pukhuri tank, dating in its present form to the eighteenth century under Ahom patronage. Assam's Shakta landscape is dense, and Ugratara sits within it alongside Kamakhya.

Tara Devi Temple, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh — a hill shrine of Bengali origin, established by a family of the Sen line who carried the goddess with them from Bengal.

Tara Tarini, Ganjam, Odisha — a hilltop shrine of twin goddesses, Tara and Tarini, revered as a breast-shrine among the Shakta Pithas. The local identification with the Mahavidya Tara is genuine and old, but it is a regional identification rather than a textual one, and the Ganjam goddesses have their own history.

Nepal — Tara is worshipped in the Kathmandu Valley by both Hindu and Newar Buddhist communities, frequently at the same sites, which is the living version of everything the origins section describes.

The philosophical content of Tara sits in her name, and it is unusually concrete. Tṛ is the verb for getting to the far bank. Everything else about her is a commentary on that.

She is what you reach for when your own resources have run out. This is the structural difference from Kali. Kali is approached as reality itself — time, dissolution, the ground before form — and the practice around her is one of accepting what is. Tara is approached as help. Her Buddhist counterpart is invoked against eight specific fears, her Hindu form appears when Shiva himself has been overcome, and the Vashishtha story turns on a sage who could not do it alone. A tradition that has a goddess of pure ferocity also needs a goddess of rescue, and the Mahavidya sequence puts them side by side on purpose.

The poison is the doctrine. The image of Tara nursing a poisoned Shiva is a statement about what compassion actually costs: the poison does not vanish, it is absorbed by someone. Shiva holds it in his throat; Tara takes what he cannot hold. Read against the Vaishnava image of grace as unearned gift, this is a distinctly Shakta account — help is not a wave of the hand but a transfer of harm.

Her speech aspect keeps her from being one-dimensional. Nila Saraswati matters because it means Tara governs not only crossing danger but articulation — the word that gets across. A goddess of the far bank who is also a goddess of speech is making a claim about language: that what is truly said carries someone.

And she is evidence against sealed traditions. The most useful thing about Tara for a reader today may be historiographic rather than devotional. Hinduism and Buddhism in eastern India were not two closed systems occasionally in dispute; for several centuries they shared ritual technology, iconography and at least one major goddess, and the Hindu tradition preserved a story admitting it. Anyone tempted to treat Indian religious history as a set of separate lineages should sit with the fact that Tara has a Buddha in her hair and the Tantras call him Shiva.