Tara Blesses Tara Nivas

From Tazmania

Over the three-day weekend following Easter, Mother Tara was felt in Koonya as never before. Zasep Rinpoche gave us the initiation and teachings of the Twenty One Taras, and Prema and Anahata manifested the Tara Mandala Dance. Our precious sangha once again came together with high spirits, and shared many exquisite moments. I myself was indeed blessed I had the merest glimpse of Mother Tara in the mushroom damp of the Koonya forest, while creating my Enlightenment dance from within my own body, my bare feet planted on the damp leaf-litter of the forest floor.

This was the first time we've done such an ambitious combined program in Tassy. The logistics, organizing, and planning had not been easy. Lots of people worked very hard. Ho to the poster-makers! The organizers! DAFT! Kim! And everybody! It was pretty complicated dealing with the protocol of three teachers, and two separate, but interlocking, programs. Everyone stayed pretty busy. But one of the most amazing things for me about this weekend was that I observed my mind being completely fixed on the object of meditation, which in this case was my Praise.

The Tara Dance is based on a traditional Tibetan text, in which twenty-one different aspects of Tara are invoked and praised For the Tara Dance, each woman chooses one of these aspects, and choreographs her own short solo dance based on it. When the Dance is performed, each Tara, one by one, is born from the center of a spiral mandala, and then dances out her praise to the world. At the same time, the other dancers remain in a spiral formation, doing the Tara Bop and repeating the mantra: Faith, Surrender, Send out Light. As each woman emerges from the mandala, she is recognized as the embodiment of one particular divine aspect of the Goddess. It is so moving to see each woman in turn

offer her inner radiance out to the world. Many people in the audience find themselves weeping.

This was my third Tara dance; I have danced Swift Protection, Auspicious Beauty and this time I chose Complete Enlightenment. Each time I've had beautiful experiences exploring the subtleties of my praise, and then discovering how to express it in movement locating the expression of the divine within my very own body.

Swift Protection was wonderful, because it tells the story of Green Tara arising from the golden blue lotus in the pool of Avalokiteswaras tears. Dancing the tear was so exquisite.

Auspicious Beauty was really fun, because I went through this whole sluttish phase of dancing her as if she were Marilyn Monroe, or a stripper in a sex show. It was too embarrassing, and I managed to tone it down to acceptable levels, but part of me still wishes Id had the nerve to do the full thing.

All during the Easter Medicine Buddha Retreat up at Dorje Ling, as I was chopping veggies in the kitchen, I kept asking myself which Tara I was going to choose. I decided to go for Joy and Laughter because it requires that everyone both the solo dancer and the mandala dancers actually laugh on cue. That always seems to be the hardest thing for people to do, and I wanted to have a go at it. Also, it had been a fairly serious year for me, and I felt I could sure use the lightening up.

So in my imagination I started creating a Clown Tara a Tara with a red clowns nose, striped tights and huge floppy feet. I meditated on the esoteric meaning of Uncontaminated Laughter, pure joy with not a trace of negativity. I chopped and chuckled as more and more ridiculous ideas came to my mind. I remembered the Ed Sullivan show on TV when I was a kid in the States. I always loved watching the man who used to do grand ballroom dancing with a life-size female rag doll, by attaching her feet to his. I thought about where I could hide the rag doll in the Gompa until my dance. I concocted schemes for hiding red noses in everyone's saris, and then during Joy and Laughter time, all twenty one Taras would put on red clown noses. I had all kinds of wacky ideas.

But where was I going to get twenty-one clown noses in one day it was way too difficult! There was so much more important stuff to do. Of course, I never got any of the props together. And then, on the Saturday morning of the retreat, when it was time to choose our Praises, someone else snaffled up the Tara of Joy and Laughter before I had a chance to get my bid in.

So then I fell back onto Plan B, my unrehearsed, unprogrammed, second choice: Tara No. 21, Complete Enlightenment. I was drawn to the sense of union and non-duality implied by it. And I liked the idea of being last, of embodying the process of synthesis and completion, of encompassing all of the previous twenty praises. I also felt strongly that I didn't want to just mime the meaning of each of the four lines of my Praise, as Id done in previous years. Because the Praise itself was unifying, completing, encompassing, I felt an aversion to breaking up its meaning into discrete narrative elements. I wanted the dance as a whole to be the expression of That, All at Once, All Here/Now. It also had to be light, easy, normal, just here/now, joyous yet relaxed. I opened my being to all of these qualities, and felt so refreshed by them.

On Sunday afternoon, when we performed the Tara Dance, I found myself in a perfect position in the mandala to observe the dance of Joy and Laughter. As had happened before, the Tara of Joy and Laughter, as well as everyone else, was having great difficulty laughing on cue. Suddenly, I felt so happy so delighted to be in my favorite spot in the whole world, with my dear family, my most beloved teachers, and twenty-one gorgeous, radiant, sari-clad goddesses swirling around me, that I burst into laughter right on cue! I caught the eye of one Tara after another, sending my joy in all directions. And then I couldn't stop! I think I laughed for the rest of the dance.

When it came my turn to dance Complete Enlightenment I grinned at the audience, and launched into my unique synthesis of Bharat Natyam and vaudevillean soft-shoe. With broad, sweeping gestures I acknowledged the mandala, the other Taras, and the audience. Then, as I struck my final over-the-top pose, to my utter amazement, the audience responded with a roar of laughter and joy and delight. What was that sound? What was that feeling? I wanted more.

-Vichara
vichara@netspace.net.au