Goddess of the Week : Tara ( Buddhist Goddess coming into Hinduism )

[Guest guest]

This is a repost article

 

Buddhist Goddesses coming to Hinduism

 

Wangchuk37

 

i've been trying to practise the Tibetan style of Buddhism for 25

years and it seems to me that it's rather the second affirmation that

is closer to the truth, i.e. that the Mahavidyas are now still

worshipped both by Hindus and Buddhist Tantrikas...

 

For over ten years now i've been telling all those willing to listen

to my discourse that those who practise Tara are maintaining a

lineage which is over 6,000 years old (my guess).

 

Of course i have no scriptural references to offer to back this

statement, it's only a "hunch" but Tara practitioners know very well

that she is offering "intuitive knowledge and wisdom" (as opposed to

discriminative knowledge and wisdom) to her followers.

 

that was my 2 cents for the day,

Tashi delegs,

Thubten Wangchuk ie

Roger Garin-Michaud from Saint-Priest near Lyon, France

[hramnaraine]

Actually Goddess Tara was found in Hinduism before the rise of Buddhism - no where in my research did i see the possibility of the opposite, if anything buddhism just made Goddess Tara more popular.

 

In India, Tara existed as a goddess within the Pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses, before she began to be adopted as a Buddhist Bodhisattva around the 6th century C.E. in the era of the Pala kings. She was a Mother Goddess within Hinduism which also included Sarasvati, Lakshmi, Parvati, and Shakti as mother goddesses. So it would be an exaggerated gloss to call her the Mother Goddess.

 

It would probably be better to see her as one face or expression of the feminine principle which had evolved over a large span of time on the Indian sub-continent. And as Martin Willson points out: "the Mother Goddess is universal, an expression of the Feminine Archetype embedded in the minds of all of us".

 

Not uncoincidentally Tara began to be adopted into the Buddhist Pantheon of Bodhisattvas just a few centuries after the Prajnaparamita Sutra had been introduced into what was becoming the Mahayana Buddhism of India. It would seem that the feminine principle makes its first appearance in Buddhism as the "Mother of Perfected Wisdom" and then later Tara comes to be seen as an expression of the Compassion of Perfected Wisdom. However, sometimes Tara is also known as "the Mother of the Buddhas", so in approaching Buddhist deities, one learns not to impose totally strict boundaries about what one goddess or Bodhisattva covers, as opposed to another goddess or even male Bodhisattva.