Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha

Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha is the mantra of Tara, the female bodhisattva invoked above all against fear and obstacle, and it is among the Vajrayana mantras that circulate openly rather than being confined to initiates. It is recited daily by many Tibetan Buddhist lay people and printed on flags and in books. The core is built on Tara's name: the tradition reads the escalating forms Tare, Tuttare, Ture as invoking her power to liberate from suffering at successive levels, from ordinary danger to the deep fear rooted in delusion, closed by svaha, the old Vedic exclamation that seals an offering.

Tara is understood to have arisen from the compassion of Avalokiteshvara and to have vowed to attain enlightenment in and to keep a female form, which has made her a focus for reflection on gender within Buddhism. She appears in many forms, the green and white being the most common, associated respectively with active protection and with long life and healing. The openness of her mantra, taught freely, unlike the empowerment-bound formulas of the higher tantras, reflects her character as a swiftly responsive, universally accessible protector.

The four central words are graded forms built on Tara's own name: tare and tuttare are vocative and intensified vocative forms addressing her directly, and ture, related to an adjective meaning swift, describes the manner of her rescue, so that the mantra as commonly taught reads roughly as an escalating address, Tara, swift savior, deliverer, rather than as an unstructured string of sound. Gelug teaching materials commonly gloss the four words as addressing in turn liberation from cyclic existence, from the traditional eight or sixteen great fears, and from illness, before svaha seals the request, though this fourfold gloss is a teaching device drawn from the tradition's own commentarial explanation rather than a claim with independent linguistic proof behind each clause, and Sanskrit grammarians would note that the etymological case for reading tuttare and ture as distinct grammatical intensifications, rather than simply as poetic repetition, is not entirely secure.

Transmission has carried the mantra from Sanskrit Tara tantras, attested from roughly the sixth century CE, into Tibetan liturgical pronunciation, where the vowels and consonants shift enough that a Sanskrit speaker and a Tibetan reciter produce audibly different sounds from the same written syllables, om tare tuttare ture soha in the Tibetanized rendering most lay practitioners actually chant. Because the mantra is recited daily by a very large lay population rather than reserved to initiates, unlike several of the higher Vajrayana formulas recorded elsewhere in this atlas, this Tibetan pronunciation, rather than the original Sanskrit, is in practice the form the overwhelming majority of living practitioners have ever learned or heard.