Tara
Tara South and Central AsiaAvalokitesvara, in Tibetan Buddhism, is accompanied by a spouse, Tara. She is the sakti of the bodhisattva, the energy of his essence. It was she who aroused him to bring into existence on earth Gautama Siddhartha. The two wives, the Chinese and the Nepalese princesses, of Sron-btsan-sgam-po, the first Buddhist king of Tibet, are held to have been incarnations of the white and green aspects of Tara.
Though the first record of her worship is a Javanese inscription of 778, there is reason to believe that the great Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang, who travelled in India between 629 and 640, encountered Tara at a shrine near Nalanda. He reports that an image accompanying Avalokitesvara and known as to-lo was a ‘popular object of worship’. On the other hand, a Bon myth relating to the origins of the Tibetan people claims that ‘a devil and an ogress held sway, and that the country was called Land of the Two Ogres. As a...
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