Green Tara: A Healing Energy for Our Time
[Note: After a year of doing the Green Tara practice during the pandemic, I have updated this story here.]
In January, from his home in Dharamshala, the Dalai Lama told a group of Chinese Buddhists that doing the Green Tara practice, particularly reciting her mantra, would be a productive response to covid-19. When word of this spread around the world, many Buddhists began immediately to invoke Tara’s healing energies in their daily meditations.
Of all the deities in the Tibetan pantheon, Green Tara is one of the most popular — you see her everywhere in the Tibetan settlements scattered throughout India, and her statue appears on many home altars. The practice of reciting mantras is very popular among the elderly Tibetans, and it has become increasingly widespread among Western Buddhist communities as well.
The basic psychology of mantra recitation isn’t complicated. As we learn more about the specific attributes of Green Tara and recite the mantra with those attributes in mind, the mantra becomes a kind of sonic shortcut to those attributes. A transformation then occurs whereby the intellectual information that we carry in our heads about Tara is given a more physical or sonic dimension as we hear and feel that information coded into the sound of our recitation. The two venues — the intellectual and the physical, or vocal — are mutually supportive and Tara’s message, her coding, is thereby strengthened. It comes to us, really, through three gates: our minds, our ears, and our mouths.
Although I often hear people speak of the protective capacity of Tibetan deities and their mantras, I find it more productive to think of them as representing a specific set of insights that we associate with the form of each deity. The deity, then, when we call her to mind, will better equip us to understand and accommodate the joys and sorrows of a human life. Different deities, representing different skill sets, help us through the challenges that arise on our path. You call a plumber for a plumbing problem, a carpenter for a carpenter problem. Same with these Tibetan deities; each one can help you in a specific way with a specific issue because they have been given over the centuries very specific abilities.
Reciting Green Tara will not, in my opinion, stop the spread of covid-19.
However, she does embody a saving energy, one that is useful in times of emergency and dire need — her right foot, in fact, is extended as if she has heard us and is already leaving her seat to come and help. And if she reminds us to create within ourselves that same kind of energy, the one that responds to the urgency of our own and our community’s needs, then she has done her job. She has helped to transform us into responsible and compassionate citizens of a community in need.
I can’t look at Green Tara now, or recite her mantra, without remembering how important it is for me to remain at home, support and love those whom I can support and love, and create within me the kind of compassion that refuses to confine itself to any group, race, ethnicity, or even species, for that matter. Tara reminds us to delve more deeply into the power of a healing presence that each of us can bring to any situation that confronts us, and to do it now with a sense of urgency that befits how we must respond quickly, mindfully, and responsibly to the presence of this global pandemic.
Tara comes without hesitation, compassionately, and with force. That is why the specific energy she brings is relevant to our current situation. We must also respond to our community’s needs immediately, compassionately, and forcefully.
May you all be well, and may a healing energy, however and wherever you access it, grow stronger within you each day.
