White Tara

White Tara is a form of the beloved bodhisattva Tara especially associated with long life, health and the removal of the obstacles that threaten it. Tara, whose name is often glossed as the one who ferries across or the star, is one of the most widely venerated deities of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism, the embodiment of the compassionate, saving activity of the buddhas in female form, and she appears in many aspects distinguished by colour and function; the green form is the swift saviouress from immediate dangers, while the white form is the giver of long life and healing.

White Tara is shown seated in the full lotus posture, white in colour, serene, one hand in the gesture of giving and the other in a gesture of protection or holding the stem of a lotus. Her most distinctive feature is that she has seven eyes: in addition to the usual two, an eye in the middle of her forehead and one in each of her palms and each of the soles of her feet, so that she is described as watching over the suffering of beings in all directions at once, seeing every place from which help might be needed. She is often invoked, together with the buddha of boundless life Amitayus and the goddess Ushnishavijaya, in a trinity of long-life deities, and her practice and mantra are widely used for the healing of the sick and the extension of life, both for oneself and, characteristically, on behalf of others. White Tara expresses the tradition's conviction that compassion is watchful and active, a saving attention turned toward suffering wherever it arises.

White Tara's practice is invoked at one of the most public rituals in Tibetan Buddhism: the long-life ceremony known as tenshug, performed for the Dalai Lama and other senior teachers, in which monks and lay devotees petition the assembled long-life deities, White Tara chief among them alongside Amitayus and Ushnishavijaya, to extend a revered life for the benefit of all beings who depend on it. Such ceremonies have been held repeatedly for the fourteenth Dalai Lama over his exile in India, often drawing thousands of participants and framed publicly as a request that a teacher of unusual importance be permitted to remain in the world.

The ritual logic follows directly from White Tara's iconography: a figure who watches from seven eyes at once is petitioned precisely because her attentiveness is understood as active and responsive rather than symbolic, capable of intervening in the length of an individual life when a community asks with sufficient sincerity and correct ritual form. The transmission of her specific long-life practice is traced in Tibetan sources to the Indian teacher Atisha in the eleventh century, who is credited with bringing several long-life lineages to Tibet, after which they were preserved and elaborated within multiple schools. The tenshug remains a living, regularly performed rite rather than a historical curiosity, tying an old iconographic scheme to an ongoing institutional practice.