A green goddess with one foot already off the throne, a blue night lotus at each shoulder, twenty-one verses of praise, and the paintings in which you can still see her clearly.
Green Tara is the main form of Tara, the female buddha Tibetans call Drolma, "the one who carries across". She is drawn green, seated on a lotus with her left leg folded and her right leg stretched down onto a smaller lotus, as if about to stand. Her right hand reaches over her knee, palm out, in the gesture of giving; her left is raised at her heart and holds the stem of a blue utpala. Her mantra calls her the swift one, and Tibetan tradition holds that she protects from eight great fears. The Cleveland Museum of Art calls her one of the preeminent figures of Tibetan Buddhist faith.
Green Tara meaning: the name
The Sanskrit Tārā comes from the root tṝ, "to cross". In its causative sense it means to carry someone across, to rescue. The same word can mean "star", since stars cross the sky. Her Tibetan name, Drolma, written sgrol ma, comes from the verb sgrol ba: to save, to free, to ferry over. Tibetans often call her Jetsün Drolma, the Venerable Liberator.
Green Tara herself is Drol Jang, sgrol ljang, "green Drolma". The Sanskrit is Śyāmatārā, which Wikipedia's survey of Tara glosses as blue-green Tara. Rigpa's encyclopedia, citing Philippe Cornu, says most textual sources agree that Green Tara is the main form of Tara and the source of all her other manifestations. On the same page Jetsün Kushok Chimey Luding, teaching in 2008, describes her as loving all beings the way a mother does, and as the deity of enlightened activity.
Activity is the word to hold on to. It explains her color, her posture and her speed.
Where Green Tara comes from
Two stories the tradition tells
The best known is a story about tears. Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, looked at the suffering of beings and wept. A blue lotus grew in the water of his tears, and Tara rose from it. In the version Wikipedia gives from the commentaries attributed to Suryagupta, she springs from the opening filaments of the utpala. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art repeats the story in its curatorial notes on a wooden Tara: she "is said to have been born from the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara's tears of compassion."
The second is a story about a vow, told as legend. In a world system millions of years ago lived a princess named Jñānacandra, in Tibetan Yeshe Dawa, "Moon of Primordial Awareness". Over many ages she made offerings to the buddha of that world, Tonyo Drupa, and took the vow of a bodhisattva. Monks told her to pray to be reborn as a man so she could reach awakening. She answered that only the weak-minded see male and female as a barrier, and vowed to work for beings in a woman's body until samsara is empty. Tonyo Drupa foretold that she would be known as Tara. Wikipedia, which sources the tale to Arni (2017), also quotes the Dalai Lama's retelling, in which she says, "I have developed bodhicitta as a woman."
Neither is history. Both are how the tradition explains who she is: compassion turned into action, and a vow made on purpose.
The earliest images
Tara was worshipped in India long before she reached Tibet. Wikipedia's survey of the scholarship places the growth of her cult in the sixth century. Kanheri Cave 90, of that century, shows her in a triad with Avalokiteshvara, and Ellora Cave 6 has an identifiable image from about the seventh. By the eighth century, under the Pala kings, her worship was well established, and Indian tantric Buddhists came to call her the Mother of All Buddhas.
Green Tara iconography: how she is drawn
Himalayan Art Resources quotes a description by Thartse Panchen Namka Chime. On an eight-petaled lotus sits Tara, reddish-green, with one face and two hands. The right hand is in the gesture of supreme generosity. The left holds an utpala at the heart between thumb and ring finger. She wears jewel ornaments and many silks, her hair piled as a crown, the right leg extended and the left drawn up. Each detail has a reason.
Why she is green
In the five buddha families, green belongs to Amoghasiddhi, "Unfailing Accomplishment", the buddha of the north. He is usually painted green and makes the gesture of fearlessness. He heads the karma family, the family of action, whose emblem is the crossed double vajra, and he is linked with the air element and with the transformation of envy. In Vajrayana Tara is his consort, and some paintings show the two in union.
The Cleveland Museum of Art puts it plainly in its note on its thirteenth-century Green Tara: "Her green color and fear-not gesture link her to the cosmic Buddha of the North, enshrined above her head." In that painting he sits in the highest niche of her shrine. Wikipedia, citing Thubten Chodron, also ties her to Amitabha's lotus family, with Amitabha resting on her crown, so on some images it is Amitabha above her head instead.
The posture
She sits on a lotus and a moon disc. Her left leg is folded in. Her right leg comes down, and the foot rests on its own small lotus.
Jeff Watt of HAR has written about how far that leg should go. The ritual texts, he says, have the right leg slightly extended in a relaxed manner, "or as if she is about to stand", and the left drawn slightly inward, sometimes described as playful. Painters choose how far the right leg reaches. The left may sit forward of the body but should never reach farther than the right. The Rubin's catalog calls the pose royal ease. The texts give it a sharper edge. This is a figure on the point of getting up.
The hands
Her right hand is the varada mudra, the gesture of granting. Watt notes that the great majority of Green Taras in painting and sculpture show the right hand extended forward, fingers pointing down, palm up and open. Some forms described in ritual texts raise it slightly instead, fingers up and palm out, in the gesture of fearlessness. Her left hand is at her heart, holding the flower stem, and HAR's description of the Rubin painting below calls it a gesture of blessing.
The utpala, one flower or two
The flower is the utpala, the blue night lotus, a different flower from the lotus she sits on. Watt points out that most of the early literature gives her a single flower, its stem in her left hand. A large number of early paintings and sculptures give her two, one rising at each shoulder, and he suggests artists did it to balance the composition. Later painters often tinted the flowers pink, white or yellow, which he calls not textually or iconographically accurate. The utpala should be blue.
White Tara is different: her single stem carries bud, flower and fruit at once, and she has seven eyes. She has her own article, and she is one of the Three Long-Life Deities.
Ornaments and attendants
She is jeweled and dressed in silks, crowned like a queen. In the three-deity form called Tara of the Khadira Forest, Khadiravani, two attendants stand with her. In Namka Chime's text orange Marichi is on her right, holding a branch of the ashoka tree, and black Ekajati on her left, holding a skull cup. Both carry fly-whisks in their right hands.
One painting to look at closely
HAR 87 is an eighteenth-century Tibetan Green Tara in the Rubin Museum, accession F1997.6.5, ground mineral pigment on cotton, described by Watt in 1998. The body is emerald green. She sits on a moon disc and white lotus, the right foot on a small moon-and-lotus cushion. Her right hand, in generosity over the knee, holds a lotus stem that blooms by her right ear; the left, at her heart, holds one that blooms on her left. Her silks are orange, yellow, violet and red. Behind her is an orange nimbus inside a red aureole. Below, a heap of colored wishing jewels rises out of a lotus pond, and the topmost jewel is burning with an orange flame.
The eight great fears
Tara is called on above all for protection from eight dangers, the aṣṭabhaya. The Āryatārāṣṭaghoratāraṇī Sūtra, cited on Wikipedia, lists them as lions, elephants, fire, snakes, robbers, water, infectious disease and demons. Lists vary. HAR's description of a nineteenth-century set of Tara paintings in the Rubin gives wild elephants, big cats, serpents, spirits, fire, floods, robbers and oppressive rulers.
Tibetan Buddhism reads each fear twice. Outwardly they are dangers to the body. Inwardly, as Wikipedia sets out, each is an affliction of the mind: pride is the lion, delusion the elephant, anger the fire, jealousy the snake, wrong views the robber, avarice the flood, desire and attachment the disease, doubt the demon.
Painters show the eight as small vignettes around the main figure; HAR's example is a person being chased by an elephant.
The Praise in Twenty-One Homages
The text at the center of Tara practice is a short hymn, the Namastāraikaviṃśatistotra, the Praise to Tara with Twenty-One Verses of Homage. It sits in the Kangyur, the canon of the Buddha's word, as Toh 438 among the Unexcelled Yoga tantras, and also inside the Tara Tantra, Toh 726, which calls it a dharani. 84000 describes it as a liturgy of twenty-seven verses. Twenty-one are homages. The closing verses describe its benefits and ask that it be recited at dusk and at dawn, and many monastics and laypeople across the Himalaya recite it daily.
The Samye Translations version on Lotsawa House opens with the mantra folded into its first verse: homage to Tara, swift and valiant; homage to Tuttara, who banishes fear; homage to Tura, who fulfils every need; with svaha we offer honor and praise.
Rigpa's encyclopedia makes a point that matters to anyone trying to match the verses to painted figures. The praise itself does not name or identify specific forms of Tara. The forms came later, from commentators, and they did not agree.
The 21 Taras: Suryagupta, Atisha and the later systems
HAR counts five systems of Twenty-One Taras. Three are about a thousand years old or more: those of Suryagupta and Atisha, named for the teachers who popularized them, and that of the Sādhanasamuccaya, a Sanskrit compendium. Two are later and Tibetan: the Longchen Nyingtik system of Jigme Lingpa, from the late 1700s, and the system of Chogyur Lingpa, from the mid-1800s. The three old lineages, HAR says, do not share the same iconographic forms.
The Suryagupta system
Suryagupta's commentaries, of around the seventh or eighth century, are the earliest Indian explanation of the forms, and HAR thinks his is likely the oldest system. It is also the most complex. Each Tara has her own posture, faces, arms, color, implements and gestures. Wikipedia notes that his list in fact runs to twenty-two, with Green Tara Khadiravani at the center as the principal Tara.
The Atisha system
Atisha's set works the other way. In HAR's account every Tara has the same single face and two arms and the same seated posture, and the variation is in color only. Each holds a vase the color of her own body. Some are slightly fierce, with open mouths, slightly enlarged canines and a furrowed brow. HAR counts four red, six white, three yellow, four orange, two maroon and two black, and calls the Atisha system probably the most commonly found in Tibetan painting.
Once you know this, the two are easy to tell apart on a wall. A Suryagupta set is a crowd of individuals. An Atisha set is one figure repeated twenty-one times, changing color.
The Nyingma lists
Rigpa describes the terma tradition of Jigme Lingpa and Chokgyur Lingpa as close to Atisha's, but with different colors and with individual emblems held on lotuses in place of vases. In Jigme Lingpa's list, in Tulku Thondup's translation, each Tara has a named activity. The ninth is Tara of the Khadira Forest, for protection from the eight great fears, and Rigpa marks her as the main Green Tara.
The Green Tara mantra
oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā
In Tibetan pronunciation it is om tare tuttare ture soha. The three middle words all play on her name. Tāre is "O Tara". Tuttāre carries the prefix ud-, up: she who pulls beings up and across. Ture means "swift one". Wikipedia's literal rendering is "Om, O Tara, I pray O Tara, O Swift One, so be it." Her seed syllable is tāṃ. The first verse of the praise unpacks exactly these words, so the mantra and the hymn explain each other.
On the back of the Cleveland Green Tara, Jean-Luc Estournel's study on Asianart.com records om ah hum written behind the goddess, the monk and Amoghasiddhi; a consecration mantra; the Buddhist creed, ye dharmā hetuprabhavā; then Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha; and four lines on patience from the Pratimoksha Sutra.
Green Tara vs White Tara
- Color. Green Tara is green, the color of Amoghasiddhi. White Tara is white, compared in her texts to an autumn moon.
- Posture. Green Tara has her right leg extended. White Tara sits with both legs folded in vajra posture.
- Eyes and flower. Green Tara has two eyes and a blue utpala, often painted as two. White Tara has seven eyes and a single stem of three blossoms.
- Emphasis. Green Tara is the swift protector from the eight fears. White Tara is practiced above all for long life, and HAR describes her as a longevity emanation of Green Tara. More in White Tara.
They are often painted as a pair. The Metropolitan Museum's White Tara and Green Tara, from Guge in western Tibet, 1450 to 1500, accession 2012.460, seats them side by side on lotus thrones rising out of pools in a mountain landscape. White Tara sits in meditation posture with the eyes of omniscience. Green Tara has one leg pendant. Both make the boon-giving gesture.
Tara in Tibet
The two princesses
Tibetan tradition ties the two Taras to the two foreign wives of Songtsen Gampo, the seventh-century king who is himself regarded as an embodiment of Avalokiteshvara. The princess Bhrikuti is said to be Green Tara, and the Chinese princess Wencheng, married to the king in 641, White Tara.
Two cautions. Wikipedia notes that Bhrikuti's historicity is not certain and that she does not appear in the Dunhuang documents, though David Snellgrove argued that the mythological reading does not rule out a real marriage. And the pairing is not fixed: the Met's entry for 2012.460 assigns the princesses the other way round, Bhrikuti to White Tara and Wencheng to Green.
Atisha and Nyethang
Atisha (982–1054), the scholar from Bengal whose disciple Dromtön founded the Kadam tradition, was devoted to Tara. He composed a praise to her and three Tara sadhanas, and the Treasury of Lives credits him with a major part in spreading her cult in Tibet. A short life story published by FPMT tells how, when the invitation came from Tibet, he asked Tara whether to go and was told that going would bring the greatest benefit.
He died in Tibet, at Nyethang, about 33 kilometers southwest of Lhasa, where the Drolma Lhakhang, the Tara temple, still stands. Wikipedia records twenty-one life-size bronze Taras in its chanting hall, and that the temple came through the Cultural Revolution with little damage after Premier Zhou Enlai intervened at the request of the government of what is now Bangladesh.
Green Tara in museums
- Cleveland Museum of Art 1970.156, Green Tara, central Tibet, about the 1260s. Gum tempera, ink and gold on sized cotton, 52.4 by 43.2 centimeters. The museum attributes it to the artist Aniko; Estournel calls that attribution "very risky", since no painting is securely known to be his. Look under her right hand for the tiny monk who commissioned it, and in the walls of her shrine for eight more Green Taras, each under a centimeter tall.
- Victoria and Albert Museum IM.37-1929, figure of Green Tara, Chamdo, eastern Tibet, possibly seventeenth century. Cast bronze, 32.7 centimeters high, with traces of former gilding. The hair is tinted blue, and a piece of turquoise is set into her necklace.
- LACMA M.69.13.3, The Buddhist Goddess Shyama Tara (Green Tara), Tibet, about the thirteenth to fourteenth century. Brass inlaid with silver and copper, with traces of paint, 16.19 centimeters high.
Our Green Tara thangka
Our Green Tara thangka follows the standard form. She is seated, left leg folded, right leg extended onto a small lotus. Her right hand is in the giving gesture and her left is at her heart. Blue flowers on long stems rise at both shoulders, the two-utpala form. Behind her is an orange halo, and around her a jeweled arch, a torana, with a guardian face, a kirtimukha, at the top, set with red and blue crystals. Below the throne is a jewel offering ringed in gold beads. The ground is red, with red peonies and clouds, and it is shown in our Crimson Cloud brocade.
The image is our own drawing, kept to traditional iconometric proportions and printed on heavy card. It is not hand-painted and not mineral pigment. It is then finished by hand at a temple by elderly lay Buddhists who practice there: glass crystals set one by one and outlines traced in gold glitter, about two days for each piece. The crystals are glass, not gems, and the glitter is not gilding. The frame is 55 by 71 centimeters around an image of 40.2 by 56.2 centimeters, with a silk brocade frame-within-a-frame, a wood frame and an acrylic front; the brocade also comes in Night Sky, Ink & Gold and Warm Sun. Part of every order goes to that temple, so every thangka is also an offering.
It is an image of Green Tara made with care. We make no claim that it protects anyone or changes anything for the person who owns it.
The other deities are in the thangka collection. How painted thangkas are made is in What Is a Thangka?, and where to put one is in How to Hang a Thangka.
Green Tara questions
What is Green Tara known for?
Swift, active compassion. She is the main form of Tara, the deity of enlightened activity, and Tibetan tradition holds that she protects from the eight great fears.
What does Drolma mean?
Drolma, sgrol ma, is Tara's Tibetan name, from sgrol ba, to save or carry across. Green Tara is Drol Jang, green Drolma.
What is the Green Tara mantra?
Oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā, said in Tibetan om tare tuttare ture soha: O Tara, she who pulls up and across, swift one.
Why is Green Tara green?
Green is the color of Amoghasiddhi, buddha of the north and head of the karma family, the family of action. Tara is his consort.
Why is Green Tara's right leg extended?
Her ritual texts describe it extended in a relaxed way "or as if she is about to stand", in Jeff Watt's summary: a deity on the point of rising to help.
What is the difference between Green Tara and White Tara?
Green Tara is green, right leg extended, holding a blue utpala. White Tara is white, in vajra posture, with seven eyes, and is practiced mainly for long life.
Who are the 21 Taras?
Twenty-one forms of Tara linked to the homages of her praise. The praise does not name them, so systems differ: Suryagupta gives each a different form, Atisha varies them by color only.
Under a centimeter
In the walls of the shrine around the Cleveland Tara there are eight more Taras, each smaller than a fingernail, each green. Nobody standing in front of the painting would see them without leaning in. Someone, more than seven hundred years ago, painted all eight anyway. On the back of the cloth her mantra is written out in full.
May whoever needs carrying across be carried.
Green Tara Thangka · Thangka collection
More from the Journal: The Three Long-Life Deities · What Is a Thangka? · Amitabha Buddha · How to Hang a Thangka · Vishvavajra: The Double Vajra
More thangka deities: Manjushri · The Earth Touching Buddha