Tibetan TARA Practices in the Occident: Visual and Musical Aspects

DharmaSun, the online platform for Tibetan Buddhist Teachings created by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche emerged from the wish to make the Buddha’s teachings available to everyone, especially Westerners. The Triple Excellence wisdom teaching, conveyed from Green Tara to recognized masters, consists of daily instructions for visualisation, mantra singing and meditation over a three year period. This paper focuses on the elaborate visual practices and the musical aspects of mantra singing with the aim of establishing a m bridge between oriental and occidental philosophy.
Since ancient times one can distinguish two opposite forms of logos: a musical logos of Heraclitean-Pythagoric origin and a semantic logos of Parmenidean-Aristotelic origin. In Western thought the semantic logos prevailed. The paper will focus on the claims for a reestablishment of the defeated musical logos by two contemporary philosophers: the Spanish María Zambrano, and the Portuguese Fidelino de Figueiredo.
According to Figueiredo words oppose a logical game to an emotional spillover, but music has the means to transform pain in transcendent beauty, without denying the pain or dehumanising our condition. Going beyond the traditional ways of Western philosophy Zambrano proposes a musical form of reasoning she beautifully called poetical reason.