In motion when you meet her. One foot down, one foot raised. Ready, but not waiting.

This is Tara. Held by ancient traditions in Tibet and India, she is a goddess of thresholds. A guide to those who are crossing borders between fear and action, the named and the nameless places.

She tends to arrive when we are waiting for something to change before we allow ourselves to be changed.

Card on header image is from The Goddess Oracle

 

Who is Tara?

Tara is one of the most widely venerated goddess figures in the Buddhist and Hindu worlds, and also one of the most complex to trace historically. She moves across traditions in a way that resists tidy origin stories.

She is worshipped today in Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, Bhutan, India, and in Tibetan Buddhist communities throughout the world. She appears in Vajrayana Buddhism as a fully enlightened female Buddha. She appears in Hindu Shakta tradition as one of the ten Mahavidyas - the great wisdom goddesses. Scholars still debate which came first, and Tara (characteristically) does not appear to care.

Her name carries two meanings in Sanskrit:

Star: Tārā in Sanskrit means star, but not star as distant and decorative. Star as the fixed point in a moving sky. The point a navigator locates themselves by when the sea offers nothing else to hold onto. In traditions where the night journey is the spiritual journey, the star is not where you are going. It is how you find your way.  

Tārayati - she who carries across. She is the one who gets you to the other shore. Scholars have noted an early association with the protection of travellers crossing water, navigators in danger on the open sea. This becomes metaphorical in the Buddhist tradition where she carries beings across the ocean of samsara (the cycle of suffering). But that older, more physical meaning of a goddess of difficult crossings remains. She is the force that gets you from one shore to the other: across the ocean of suffering, and across the thresholds of life that feel impossible to navigate alone.  

Tara is not a destination. She is orientation itself. She is the capacity to move in the right direction when you have lost your bearings. Associated with swift compassion and fearlessness, she does not sit in remote meditative stillness waiting to be sought. She is already in motion.

Yeshe Dawa: The Vow

There are many origin stories for Tara.

The most well-know is that she emerged from the compassionate tears of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, when he wept at the scale of world suffering. A lotus bloomed in his tears. Tara opened from within it.

The second is older, and speaks directly to the sovereignty of the feminine divine. 

Many aeons ago, a princess named Yeshe Dawa - Moon of Primordial Awareness - devoted countless lifetimes to meditation and practice, accumulating the merit and understanding of a bodhisattva. She was advanced. And was recognised as such. She was approached by monks who suggested that, given her high attainment, she should pray to be reborn in a male body to complete her path to enlightenment. 

In response, Yeshe Dawa told them (with some directness) that "male" and "female" are empty labels created by wrong thinking. Gender is not a barrier to enlightenment. And then she made her vow:

There are many who desire enlightenment in a male body, but none who work for the benefit of sentient beings in the body of a woman. Therefore, until the world is emptied of suffering, I shall work for the benefit of sentient beings in the form of a woman." 

She refused to accept the spiritual dualism that saw her female body as a barrier. She named that framework as the delusion it was and moved forward from exactly where she stood. She became enlightened in female form, and that enlightened energy - Buddha in female form - is Tara. 

 

Green Tara: Star Goddess

Tara manifests in many forms - twenty-one in the Tibetan tradition, each with its own qualities and practices. In Hindu tantra she tends toward fiercer aspects, closer in appearance to Kali, dark and wrathful and standing on the prone form of Shiva. In Vajrayana Buddhism the most widely venerated form is Green Tara.

Green, in Tibetan Buddhist iconography, is the colour of the wind element - movement, vitality, the quality of action. It is also associated with enlightened activity in the world. She is not the still, clear white of purifying wisdom or the deep blue of unshakeable equanimity. She is green, which is also seen as the accumulation of all the other colours.

In my own goddess practice I have come to understand Tara as a "Star Goddess", part of a category (not the right word, but its hard to explain this concept in english) of vast, multi-faceted deities - like Ishtar, Mary, and Isis. These are deities whose energy has radiated far beyond their places of origin. While each remains, of course, deeply rooted in their own specific history and the peoples and traditions who have venerated them, they seem to share a quality of being beacons or stars. Fixed points by which we can locate ourselves by, holders of unimaginably vast wisdom. 

Tara's commonly illustrated posture is called lalitasana, royal ease. Instead of both legs folded in the full meditation posture of a deity settled in perfect stillness. Her left leg draws in, her right leg extends, with her right foot resting lightly on a small lotus, just touching the ground. This is a precise iconographic statement. She is not sealed in meditation. She can stand up. She is, in the language of her own tradition's visual code, one movement away from rising to meet whatever speaks to her.

Her right hand is extended in varada mudra - the gesture of giving, of generosity, of open-handed response. Her left hand holds at her heart the stem of the blue utpala lotus, a night-blooming flower that opens in the dark.

Put together: we have a dense and layered goddess in the posture of readiness, one hand open in generosity, the other holding the flower that blooms in darkness, already oriented toward action, already more than halfway to her feet.

 

What Tara Teaches

Swift action from a grounded place. Tara is not impulsive. Her movement comes from the stillness her left leg still holds. She acts from the ground of who she is, swiftly, without hesitation, but deeply rooted. She is a model of what it looks like to respond rather than react, to move without losing your centre.

Fearlessness. The Tara Sadhana (the traditional Tibetan practice) speaks of her protection from the "Eight Great Fears". While these are traditionally listed as external dangers like lions, fire, snakes, and thieves, they are also understood as eight inner states: pride, delusion, anger, jealousy, wrong views, desire, miserliness and doubt. In the presence of Tara, we find the courage to face these states.

Compassion that acts. Compassion in the Buddhist sense - Karuna - is not just feeling the suffering of others. It is the active motivation to respond with care. Tara is the 'action-aspect' of compassion. This is compassion that doesn't just contemplate or feel, but moves in response. 

Right action as self-knowledge. Tara's movement is informed by wisdom and by Bodhicitta - the enlightened heart/ mind that seeks the liberation of all things. This is action sourced from within rather than compelled from without. Not I should or I must, but I know. The step she takes is the one her whole being has already agreed to.

Approaching a Living Tradition

Tara is actively venerated in Buddhist and Hindu communities today, and this shapes how we approach her.

Unlike goddesses whose traditions were forcibly suppressed or whose worship exists only in archaeological record and scholarly reconstruction, Tara has current continuous living lineages. The practitioners and teachers who carry these lineages - Tibetan, Nepalese, Mongolian, and others - are the appropriate first voices on her meaning and practice. The mantra associated with Green Tara, Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha, belongs within this living tradition. It is not something to borrow casually if it is not part of our own culture.

What we can do is approach her with the same quality she embodies: honestly, without pretension, open to what she actually is rather than what we might want her to be. She is more complex than any summary. She is a figure of fierce joy and swift action who has been crossing the borders between traditions for over a thousand years. She does not need us to flatten her to make her accessible.

For those drawn to work with her more deeply in a devotional practice, an appropriate path is through the tradition that carries her. Seek out teachers within Tibetan Buddhism, through centres affiliated with FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition) or other established lineages, through voices from the communities she belongs to.

Meeting Tara

Tara arrives when we have been waiting. Waiting for permission that is never going to arrive. Waiting for conditions to improve before we allow ourselves to move.

This could look like waiting until we are more healed. More prepared. More certain. Until we have better tools, a better financial situation, a body that cooperates, a mind that is quieter, a life that has settled into something more manageable. Waiting, in other words, for the form we have been given to stop being an obstacle.

Yeshe Dawa did not wait. She looked clearly at the claim that her form was a problem and named it as delusion. She moved from exactly what she had, to exactly where she needed to go.

Tara offers us this quality of moving despite the presence of obstacles. Not fearlessness as the absence of fear, but fearlessness as the refusal to be stopped by it. The extended foot. The hand already open. The posture of someone who has already decided.

She does not grant us the perfect conditions we have been waiting for. She asks what can we do with what we have, right now, with one foot already on the ground. 

A Gift and An Invitation

If you feel called to sit with Tara’s energy this moonth, I have created a workbook designed to help you tune into her resonance in your own life. Inside, you’ll find journal prompts and moon-phase practices that bridge her ancient teachings with the practicalities of our modern, lived experience.

 

Join Us Inside MoonWise

Each moon cycle within the MoonWise Membership, we sit with a different face of the Sacred Feminine. This practice is one of relationship, learning to be graceful guests of ancient traditions with respect and reciprocity, while building a personal spiritual practice that is grounded in the reality of our modern lives.

We don’t seek to own these goddesses or their stories; we seek to be changed by them.

If you are ready to move beyond dogmatic frameworks and into a practice that honours the history of the Goddess, connects with the seasons and cycles, and explores the complexity of your own human experience, you can join us here. 

Follow the Thread

For those who want to go deeper into the scholarship and sources:

• The FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition) — resources on Tara practice from within the living Tibetan Buddhist tradition: fpmt.org
  A great resource for those wishing to learn from the lineages that have preserved her teachings.
• Thinley Norbu, Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the Five Wisdom Dakinis (1981) — A profound look at the "Five Wisdom Dakinis" from a celebrated master of the Nyingma lineage.
• Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Dear Little Child or Teachings on Tara: These offer the devotional and practical heart of Tara practice.
• Martin Willson, In Praise of Tārā: Songs to the Saviouress (1986) — A massive academic undertaking that traces the hymns and lineages of Tara through history.
• Miranda Shaw, Buddhist Goddesses of India (2006) — Provides the historical and cultural landscape of Tara's emergence in India.
• The Wikipedia article on Tara (Buddhism) — unusually well sourced; good entry point for the textual history and iconographic traditions
  

I encourage you to source these books through your local library or independent bookstores.

If you are buying online, The FPMT Foundation Store is an excellent way to support the living Tibetan lineage directly. For general titles, Bookshop.org (UK/US) and World of Books which offer more circular and community-focused alternatives to major global retailers.