Tara knows she is not real

Western student having issues with yiddam pracitce asks a Lama if Tara is real?

Lams says, 'Tara knows she is not real'.

I just love this teaching statement! It encapsulates so much Dharma into itself. Please indulge me as I tease out some of the implications.

(White)Tara is the Goddess of Compassion in Tibetan Buddhism. Many westerners get hung up on deities when approaching Tibetan Buddhism. They can't shake the allergy acquired from the monotheistic religion of their youth.

In Tibetan Buddhism a deity practice would be to first visualize Tara in front of you, then merge with Tara and become enlightened. What the hell is going on here you ask? The problem is we cannot approach emptiness (selflessness) directly because “our brains are ontology making machines.” So the Tibetans came up with an ingenious practice to see this. First you use the brains ontology making to create a being in front of you, in this case Tara. It is very hard work for most. You are crossing the boundary of what is real and what is imagined and seeing that there is no real difference between waking and dreaming. OK so now Tara is in front of you, beautifully transparent in her radiant splendor. Next you merge your self-sense (ontology) with Tara's. Since Tara (and you) is imagined, it is pretty easy to do. You see yourself as this radiant transparent being. Lastly you dissolve that being revealing the Clear Light Emptiness. Again, this is easy to do because you learned how to create the image from “nothing”, you allow the image to return to “nothing”. But do you see how you can not do this directly, because your brain is a machine, it wants to reify perceptions into selves (I, We and Its). So we have to lull that tendency to hard reification to “sleep”, hence the merging with the dreamstate capacity of creating ephemeral images. Only from a less opaque more transparent self can you intuit the non-existence of self.

This is the same way Buddha dealt with the hard wired mythological ontology of his contemporaries. He did not fight with them and say that the deities believed in were not real and did not exist. Most when confronted with the no-self doctrine cannot fathom it. They have to be let down “easy”. Instead, he convinced them that the god's existence was impermanent. And because the gods were the basis of the personal mythology of the people themselves, they had a chance at seeing the impermanence of their own selves. That is, if they made the connection between the self of the deities and the self they personally felt existed. Since this was already an established belief at the time, that you could evolve to a god-like realm of existence if you were “good” enough, the Buddha's students had a chance at realizing selflessness, at the very least a lotus seed was planted in their minds.

The Lama is doing the same thing in saying, “Tara knows she is not real.” The implication for the student is to see that she or he is already in fact a Tara (an imagined being) i.e. how self is not real but imagined or constructed by a machine that imagines selves. So, what dream of self is your brain imagining right now, only you don't realize it?


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