Illustration by Yuko Shimizu

Soon after, I began practicing Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and was introduced not only to an extensive practice of meditation, but also to the rich mythology of Tantric deities. I was drawn in particular to Tara, the female Buddha and embodiment of compassion or the wish for others to be free from suffering. She is known as the “Mother Liberator” since compassion is at the heart of spiritual liberation or enlightenment within Tibetan Buddhism. One of my teachers instructed me to see her as friend, mother, sister, and homegirl! My engagement with her system of ritual practice and meditation deepened my sense of attunement to and concern for not just my own pain, but that of others around me.

As my intimacy with Tara and the music of Sweet Honey deepened, I began to hear the essence of Tara in Sweet Honey’s music—“Where do I go when there’s nowhere to turn to / Woman, hold my hand.” Listening to Sweet Honey and engaging in the practice of visualizing Tara and chanting mantras to her gives me a profound sense of the divine feminine. I have found both practices deeply healing in my development as a Buddhist, activist, and black queer man. As I began to study womanism, the term Alice Walker coined in 1983 to address the intersection of racism and sexism neglected by white feminists, I realized womanism had a profound affinity with Tara’s practice of liberatory compassion. Walker defines a womanist as a woman who “[a]ppreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women’s strength.”² Walker celebrates the warmth, love, and compassion of the female body in its many capacities—just as Tara the female Buddha does. Womanism restores love and compassion as key practices within a liberatory ideology, just as love and compassion are central to the very essence of Tara. As I have continued to deepen my personal Buddhist practice and my activism on behalf of racial healing, the songs of Sweet Honey in the Rock and Tara’s mantras have formed a centering and empowering soundscape to my work. The fierce love of Tara and of womanists like Walker wake me up every morning. They refuse to let me apologize for my being here. They bless me with the capacity to be silent, alone, and grieving when I most need to be.

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By supplicating with palms joined in heart-felt faith,
She quickly and easily bestows all desired benefits.
With reverence permeating my body, speech and mind,
I perpetually offer homage to the foremost and noble Tārā.
—The Praise of the Twenty-One Homages to Tārā and Its Benefits³

I was first introduced to Tara through the chanting of her mantra in my first sangha (Buddhist congregation). My sangha met weekly in a hall with a high ceiling and tall windows in Harvard Square. When we chanted the mantra, warm sensuous music filled every crevice of the space. Our version of her mantra—Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha—was a soaring melodic chant that for me still evokes an experience of being protected, cared for, and guarded. That same year I attended a retreat in Santa Rosa, California where I was encouraged to visualize myself as a Tara during a guided meditation. Just before the retreat, I had gone through a romantic break-up and I was the only person of color in the retreat. I was feeling lonely and marginalized. As I sat in the large room with dozens of other retreatants, visualizing myself as Tara, I felt like there was someone who cared. Identifying as the deity helped me to let go of the painful experiences and enabled me to open my heart to self-compassion. During the subsequent decade, I have continued these practices. Identifying with Tara has allowed me to develop a sense of the divine feminine within my experience of masculinity. Working with Tara’s energy gives me the feeling of being a little boy running to my mother when I felt scared; it is the feeling of how she would embrace me. That’s how chanting Tara’s mantra and identifying with her image makes me feel. But exactly who—and what—is Tara?

Tara is the female Buddha of compassion and is mostly associated with Tibetan Tantric Buddhism. Called Drolma in Tibetan, her name means Female Liberator or Mother Liberator. In her most recognized form she is Green Tara, a radiant woman of color who sits on an immaculate lotus draped in the finest silks and adorned in exquisite ornaments. The most popular exploration of her origins was rendered by Taranatha, the great seventeenth-century Tibetan lama and scholar who composed The Origin of the Tara Tantra. The work is largely anecdotal, with Taranatha seeming to string together various legends of Tara’s origin and the spread of her particular practice. The narrative has the feeling of mythology and is an example of how the Tibetan conception of history is a mystical construction where time is not linear and where meaning is derived from the divine and supernatural; the mystical is privileged over historical fact.⁴The Origin of the Tara Tantra tells the mythical story of the origin of the first and only female Buddha in Tibetan Buddhism. Yet it is no mere story: the narrative has impacted both Tibetan and non-Tibetan Buddhist conceptions about compassion and how to practice it.

The Origin of the Tara Tantra reveals that in a long-ago time, a Buddha named Sound of the Drum emerged.⁵ At the same time, there lived a princess named Wisdom Moon. She was faithful and deeply devoted to the Buddha and his retinue, so devoted that she spent ten million one hundred thousand years making offerings to them. Needless to say, the retinue was quite pleased. The princess was able to accumulate enough wisdom and merit to achieve the initial stages of bodhicitta, the awakened heart. The monks were thrilled, and they encouraged her to continue her practice:

It is a result of these, your roots of virtuous actions, that you have come into being in this female form. If you pray that your deeds accord with the teachings, then indeed on that account you will change your form to that of a man.

But the princess was not so pleased with this answer. She responded by criticizing their short-sightedness, vowing to achieve enlightenment as a woman:

In this life there is no such distinction as “male” and female,” neither of “self-identity,” a “person” nor any perception (of such) and therefore attachment to ideas of “male” and “female” is quite worthless. Weak-minded worldings are always deluded by this. . . .

There are many who wish to gain enlightenment in a man’s form, and there are but few who wish to work for the welfare of sentient beings in a female form. Therefore may I, in a female body, work for the welfare of beings right until Samsara has been emptied.

Tara continued to practice for another ten million one hundred thousand years. Her meditative attainments were so great that they helped to liberate one trillion people a day. She became known as the “Saviouress,” and the Buddha Sound of the Drum renamed her Tara. In the presence of the Tathagata Amoghasiddhi (one of the five Wisdom Buddhas), she made a vow to protect and guard all sentient beings. Each day, while in samadhi, a state of meditative higher consciousness, she helped one trillion beings become enlightened and she vanquished one trillion demons each night. She would eventually be known as “the Swift one, Heroine, the Liberator, and the Affectionate Mother.” It is because of Tara’s fierce dedication to the liberation of all beings that she became so associated with compassion.

Tara is an example of a being who purified the ordinary states of her mind, ascending to the level of the divine and attaining the state of a deity. Tantra emerges out of the belief that beings are already enlightened but do not realize it yet. To be enlightened is to know the true nature of one’s own mind. In Tibetan Buddhism, tantra is a means through which a practitioner can quickly achieve realization of the nature of mind in a single life through ritualistic practice that includes meditation, chanting, visualization, and deity devotion, as well as physical and energy-based yoga practices. As the influential Tibetan teacher and scholar Lama Thubten Yeshe has written: “the tantric yogi or yogini—as these supremely skillful practitioners are called in Sanskrit—learns to think, speak, and act now as if he or she were already a fully enlightened Buddha. Because this powerful approach brings the future result of full awakening into the present moment of spiritual practice, tantra is sometimes called the resultant vehicle to enlightenment.”⁶ Lama Yeshe’s insight evokes the contemporary proverb of “faking it till you make it.” In this tradition, the practitioner endeavors to take on the views and actions of enlightenment before actual enlightenment is achieved.

Tibetan teacher and meditation master Bokar Rinpoche explores the nature of the deity in his work on Tara, titled Tara the Feminine Divine. He highlights the importance of two levels of reality in Tibetan conceptions: the relative and the ultimate. Relative reality is what we perceive through our senses and interact with in our day-to-day lives. This reality also includes the thoughts and emotions that we experience and interpret to be real. Ultimate reality, on the other hand, refers to the true nature of reality: an emptiness and space that reveals the manifestations of the relative to be illusionary in nature. In the relative, we are sensing things and interacting with things, but at the same time what we are interacting with is only a mental fabrication that occurs because we do not understand the true nature of our minds or ultimate reality. Once the nature of mind is understood, one perceives all reality as an expression of one’s own mind. Deities are not just located on an ultimate level but pervade both levels of reality, just as mind does. “In effect,” Bokar Rinpoche writes, “their nature is such that practicing with deities leads to the realization of the ultimate deity, that is, the mode of being of the mind.”⁷ Until the nature of mind is understood, there will continue to be the misunderstanding that there is an inherent duality of subject/object, or of I/other.

Tara’s realization helped her to understand the essence of phenomenal reality and allowed her to see that there was ultimately no gender. As a woman, she rejected the belief that enlightenment could only be attained in the male form. She recognized the systematic oppression of the female body in spiritual communities and refused to reproduce the patriarchal devaluing of her own body. She was defiant in the face of this oppression. Even when examining her traditional iconography as Green Tara, she defies the traditional way by which other Buddhas are represented. In contrast to the standard image of a Buddha sitting in full lotus posture, Tara sits with her right leg extended outward. This posture is an act of subversion and resistance, because what Green Tara represents is active and direct compassion. She rejects a comfortable seat, instead readying herself to respond to the needs of anyone that calls on her.

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The deeper we go into our suffering the more fervent the wish for the well-being of others. We act. We act because our inaction is felt as a participation in that suffering.
—Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei⁸

Tara developed a love and appreciation of the female form even in a location that did not value her body. In this way, Tara recalls some of the central insights and ideals of womanism. Womanism reintroduces the colored female body as a body of love, compassion, and kindness. This reintroduction constitutes a strategy for healing these bodies from the trauma of oppression. Womanism critiques any pursuit or idea that does not promote radical self-love to address the traumas of racism, capitalism, homophobia, ableism, and patriarchy within the experiences, bodies, minds, and spirits of women of color.

Tara’s mythology privileges the female body. Her narrative is not about a woman who is a victim of patriarchy but about one who transcends it. Tara’s resilience against othering is also an expression of the mode of female empowerment expressed by black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde when she spoke of the erotic. In Sister Outsider, Lorde writes:

When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.⁹

Tara’s rebuttal to the male-dominated community of monks—invalidating their claim that enlightenment was reserved for the male body—was erotic.

Tara is said to bless and encourage practitioners when they focus their formal meditations on her by helping them understand the empty nature of fear. One of the primary elements of this practice is imagining oneself as Tara. Visualizing Tara in this way encourages a direct identification with the essence of Tara and compassion. When we enter practice with the understanding that Tara’s nature is emptiness, then when we see ourselves as Tara—or any deity—we are also seeing our bodies and minds, including our thoughts and emotions, as a manifestation of emptiness. Within more popular practice, Tara is said to be ready at any time to enter into the messiness of our suffering as a personal agent of our liberation. She becomes Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman,” endowed with the audacity and sacred agency to make our suffering and liberation her personal agenda. Some wonder about the secret behind the confidence of the female subject of Angelou’s poem: “Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. / I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size”—the female speaker of the poem confides playfully—“But when I start to tell them, / They think I’m telling lies.”¹⁰ Tara’s secret is that she knows how we lose ourselves in suffering, and she comes to find us like a mother who has lost her precious one.