Tara is one of Buddhism’s most revered deities in the Himalayas. Usually she is portrayed as a beautiful young woman.
This cloth painting depicts a large central image of Tara surrounded by twenty of her smaller manifestations that are identical except for the colour of their skin. It is a pictorial representation of a prayer to the Twenty-One Taras that helped practitioners to visualize these divine figures. The donors of this thangka are shown at the bottom right.