Who is Mā Tārā?

This past weekend, on Saturday, we celebrated Tārā Jayanti. It felt very fitting to give a talk praising this enigmatic form of Mā! 

The first thing we do in this lecture is to distinguish the very popular Tibetan Buddhist deity, Tārā from the Tantrik Hindu version. 

We then trace the origins of the Tibetan Buddhist Tārā to Parā Devī, the esoteric Tantrik Sarasvatī who is the absolute conception of reality in the Trika System of Non-Dual Shaivism. 

As an aside, we track how elements of Parā's iconography is present in the meditation/visualization mantra for Abhinava Gupta, the Trika master par excellence. We show how elements of Dakshinamurthi Stotram are also present in the Abhinava Gupta visualization mantra and that of the Goddess Parā! 

Having established the link between Parā and the Tibetan Buddhist Tārā, and having made the case that this is a Saumya (gentle) form of the Tārā, we then turn to the Tantrik Hindu Tārā of the cremation ground which tends to emphasize the Ghora (fierce) aspects of the Deity.

 We explore Tārā's link to the Tantrik left-hand (Vāma-marga) and we also compare Mā Tārā to Mā Kālī to make the case that they really are the same Being. Naturally, we say something about Tārāpītha, Mā's sacred temple in a cremation ground in the Birbhum district of Wes Bengal and about Mā's empowered saint, Vama Khepa. We tell the story of Vāsistha and how he had to go to Tibet to learn the Kaula Marga or the Vāmachāra (left-hand path) from the Buddha and how this allowed him to succeed in Tārā-sādhana and establish the holy site of Tarapeeth in Bengal as a śākta-pītha! 

We really get up to some Tantrik stuff in this lecture! Thanks all for coming live. 

Jai Mā Tārā!

PS: here is our playlist on all things daśa-mahāvidya!

You'll find a complete playlist of introductory lectures on Tantra in both theory and practice here. 

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