Tarapith, Bamakhepa and the Direction of the Borrowing

Her great seat is Tarapith in Birbhum district, West Bengal, a temple beside a cremation ground on the Dwarka river. What draws practitioners there is the smashan itself, where ascetics keep fires and perform practices that most temples would not permit on their grounds, and the site is inseparable from Bamakhepa, the nineteenth century ascetic who lived there, was known for behaviour that ignored ordinary decorum, and is venerated alongside the goddess. A subsidiary account has the goddess appear as a mother nursing Shiva after he drank the poison churned from the ocean, which gives an unexpectedly maternal reading of a fierce image, and it is depicted at the temple.

The relationship between the two Taras is a live scholarly question rather than a settled one. The mainstream position holds that the Hindu Tara took her name and much of her form from Buddhist sources: her attestation in Buddhist material is earlier, the Akshobhya in her hair is a straightforwardly Buddhist element, and the Hindu tantras themselves preserve an account in which the sage Vasishtha is sent to Mahachina to learn her worship from the Buddha, which reads as the tradition acknowledging an import. Others argue for a shared eastern Indian tantric environment with traffic running both ways. The atlas records this as debated and names the camps rather than choosing.