The Hindu Tara, second of the ten Mahavidyas, shares a name with the Buddhist Tara and very little else in temperament. She is dark blue, short and pot-bellied, standing in the pratyalidha posture on a corpse in a cremation ground, wearing a tiger skin and a garland of severed heads, with a snake for a sacred thread, her tongue protruding and her matted hair topped by a small blue image of the buddha Akshobhya. She holds a knife or scissors, a skull cup, a lotus and a sword.
She stands so close to Kali that texts and images have to distinguish them by detail: the colour, the tiger skin, the pot belly, the Akshobhya in the hair. Her names include Ugra Tara, the fierce Tara; Ekajata, the one with a single matted lock; and Nila Sarasvati, the blue Sarasvati, which pulls the goddess of speech into the cremation ground much as Matangi is pulled to the edge of the settlement.
The Buddhist Tara is something else. She is the goddess who saves from the eight great fears, green or white, seated with one foot extended in readiness to rise, and addressed in a mantra recited daily across the Tibetan world. Both are called Tara, both are called mother, and newcomers to either tradition conflate them constantly, which is why the atlas holds the two as separate entries.