The Uncountable Benefits of Tara Practice
In the new book The Power of Mantra: Vital Practices for Transformation, Lama Zopa Rinpoche guides students through understanding the power and benefit of mantras. Rinpoche explains many popular mantras, giving specific instructions for practicing them, including Shakyamuni Buddha, Chenrezig, Manjushri, Tara, Medicine Buddha, Vajrasattva, and more. In an excerpt from the chapter on Tara mantra, Rinpoche discusses Mother Tara:
The benefits of practicing Tara are uncountable. By reciting the Praises to the Twenty-One Taras with devotion, at dawn or dusk, and remembering Tara and reciting her mantra at any time of the day or night, we are protected from fear and danger, and all our wishes are fulfilled. If we pray to Tara, Tara will grant help quickly.
She is especially quick in granting us success in obtaining the ultimate happiness of enlightenment, but there are also many temporal benefits of reciting the Tara mantra or the Praises to the Twenty-One Taras prayer. Tara can solve many problems in life: liberating us from untimely death, helping us recover from disease, bringing us success in business. Somebody with a serious problem, such as a life-threatening disease, who relies on Tara will very commonly be freed from that problem. For instance, His Holiness the Dalai Lama encouraged us to recite Tara’s mantra as a protection for ourselves and others against the coronavirus COVID-19.
Pabongka Dechen Nyingpo tells a story of one of his students who didn’t know much Dharma but had faith in Tara and so received help from her, but not as much as he might have. One day during his journey to Mongolia, while walking along reciting Tara prayers, he heard a dog barking and saw a tent. Because he needed some water to quench his thirst, he went there, where he saw a young girl, alone, tending many yaks. Seeing the monk was weak and hungry, she insisted he stay with her for a few days and she fed him. When it was time to leave, she gave him some tsampa and other food. Because he was completely lost, she gave him very explicit directions on how to get to his destination and, as he was leaving, she gave him a large bunch of grass. She explained that when he awoke each morning, he should drop some grass on the ground and head in whichever direction it fell.
He only had a little food, enough for a day or two, but each day, when he opened the sack, his food was never depleted. Following the directions the girl had given him, he managed to find his way to his destination. When he looked in his sack at the very end of his journey, there was not one speck of food left. He was so surprised with this that he sent a letter to his guru, Pabongka Rinpoche, in Lhasa. Rinpoche wrote back and said that it was a pity he hadn’t followed the girl’s instructions completely. If he had, he would have been in a pure realm already. That yak herder was a manifestation of Tara, but he was unable to see this. Tara manifests in many aspects, not just the green and white forms that are commonly depicted.
Tara is like our mother. Take my mother as an example. She did all the work while the rest of us—there were three of us—were useless. One day, she had to go into the forest to get the firewood. Because none of us could make food, we waited outside the door for her to return so we could eat. When she came back very late with a very heavy load of firewood, she could not make a fire because she was sick. She lay down next to the fireplace in so much pain. There was no fire in the stove and no food. She was screaming, calling for her mother: “Ama! Ama!” (My grandmother, who was still alive at that time, lived quite near.) Because none of us could make one, there was no fire; we just sat and watched our mother. Even adults call for their mother when they have bad pain or a serious problem. However, Tara is much closer to us than a mother, and she is quick to grant us help and protect us from danger.
The best way we can become close to Tara, what pleases her the most, is when we fervently try to develop the mind of bodhichitta. The more we are able to practice bodhichitta and cherish others more than ourselves, the closer we will be to Tara, and the easier it will be for her to offer us help quickly.
The Praises to the Twenty-One Taras begins, “I prostrate to the noble transcendent liberator.” That means that Tara herself is completely liberated from the whole of samsara and the cause of samsara through having completed the both the method and wisdom sides of the practice. Not only that, by having overcome the two obscurations, gross and subtle, she is also free from being bound to lower nirvana. Liberated from both samsara and the peace of lower nirvana means she is fully enlightened. And because she in turn liberates all of us, allowing us to attain full enlightenment, she is called Tara the Liberator, the mother who liberates.
