The liturgy known in English as In Praise of the Twenty-One Taras, chanted daily in monasteries across the Tibetan Buddhist world, addresses Tara in twenty-one successive forms, each given her own verse, her own body color, ranging through white, red, yellow, black and several shades of a protective dark blue-green, her own hand gesture or implement, and her own particular sphere of protection, from safety in travel to victory over enemies to the pacification of disease and evil spirits.
The text traces to an Indian Sanskrit original, the Namastara Ekavimshati Stotra, translated into Tibetan and absorbed into the daily liturgical cycle of all four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, which is itself a mark of how widely Tara devotion crosses otherwise significant doctrinal and lineage divisions within Tibetan Buddhism. Despite the numbering and the sharply differentiated iconography, the twenty-one are understood doctrinally as aspects or emanations of a single underlying bodhisattva rather than as twenty-one independent deities competing or cooperating with one another, an important distinction from a polytheistic pantheon: a practitioner praying to any one of the twenty-one is understood to be addressing Tara herself in a particular protective mode suited to a particular danger or need, the same relationship a devotee of any single form of Tara, Green or White, already has to the wider figure.