Spirituality/Eastern: Green Tara And The World Situation

Editor's Note: This article was orinally published immediately after our "victory" in Afghanistan, and before our involvement in the fiasco in Iraq.

Green Tara, one of twenty-one Taras, each with the name of a color, is the mother protector of the Tibetan people. She and her sister White Tara, a spiritual ice queen who is too pure to be much involved in our worldly affairs, are the most popular and well known colors, or flavors, of this goddess rainbow. Because she is the loving mother, she is much revered by her people. To the Tibetan Buddhists, she is a self-created deity and only exists when a person is being mindful of her. She cannot write, talk or otherwise express herself in the same manner as you and I.

This doesn’t mean that she is without personality or thoughts of her own. If she could speak about current events, for example, she would doubtlessly express the opinion that war is never, ever good for you. War, she would say, even if it moves a people to examine their character and recognize a nationwide decadence that’s led to an obsession with sex and pleasing the senses materialistically, can never be a good thing. Even when it forces people to carefully define their values, or when it instills a new pride in how together we can be in spite of our broad diversity, the battlefield is not a good place. Even when we are lucky, when old and young men take arms to do battle with perhaps noble but definitely crafty tribes people, and we ride in victory on three horses called Liberty, Justice and American Way, even then war is not good.

Even when your side wins, gaining victory on levels deeper than in the original bargain, war is not a good thing. Even when it’s a win-win-win situation and nobody loses but the bad guys. There’s a danger in being the victor in a just cause, Tara would remind us, a danger that all causes may become just causes. Although it feels good to be kicking butt and doing the world a favor at the same time, history teaches us that World War II gave way to McCarthyism and Korea, which gave way to Vietnam - a steady descent from the lofty into the world of the fallible.

Because it evokes the spirit of death and sacrifice, Tara would say, war is never good, even when the outcome is such that everyone, save the bad guys, is seemingly the winner. War always means needless deaths and wanton hardship and destruction that never would have happened in the first place if people had been reasonable. It would serve us to remember that the celebration of 1945 was because we had won the war, our boys could now come home and we were safe from the Nazis. The celebration was not because we thought the war had been a great one.

If Green Tara could walk and talk like a human woman, she would tell us that even if we have pulled a rabbit out of the karmic hat and have truly liberated a people, made our world safer and brought nations together in an historical agreement; even then, war is still not good for you.

Like most Buddhist deities, Green Tara sits cushioned on a lotus blossom. Her right leg is extended to indicate that she is ready to rise to the aid of all beings. Her left hand is at her heart, palm facing outward, fingers up, thumb and ring finger touching. The Tibetans call this the refuge gesture, and it indicates that people have the potential to rise above arguments and bickering to become much more than we are now. Her right hand is on her right knee, thumb and first finger touching, the remaining fingers pointing downward; the gesture for granting realizations.

A Priestess of Tara, one who has taken her as a Yidam deity and devoted years to understanding her, might venture to suggest that the time has come for us to receive some of those realizations. Tara would want us to realize that after we have made our victory complete, we should then move on. It would not be an auspicious sign, for us or the world, if we were to spend time becoming a nation that put energy into war.

Mother Tara would probably be proud that we have been vigilant and victorious, but she would caution us about the intoxication that is a part of that victory. Like a good mother, she would understand that we Americans are wonderfully cocky, but worry that we might let our cockiness get us in trouble. She would warn us not to swipe defeat out of the arms of victory. Winning a war, she would say, is nothing to brag about, even if it is much better than loosing.

Win or lose, war is never good for you.

©Copyright 2003 by AlternativeApproaches.com