Partway through a 2026 Tara puja livestream, the teacher stops describing the ritual and starts describing its architecture. A devotional practice that can look, from the outside, like a sequence of visualizations, offerings and chanted lines turns out to be a deliberate three-part structure, and the teacher is insistent that each part is doing different work. The beginning generates a motivation that reaches past the practitioner. The middle dissolves the ordinary sense of a separate self and a separate object of devotion. The end seals whatever merit has been built by giving it away. This article follows that structure, using the teacher's own framing from the livestream, so that a reader who never sat through the broadcast can understand what a Tara practice is asking the practitioner to do.
The teacher traces the practice to a single instruction manual, which the transcript renders as the Lexosum, or "the three lexo." The name points to a story the teacher relays about the manual's origin: a sacred place where the Jinas, the teacher says, revealed the material, and where three figures, named in the transcript as Mma, Jamwo and Jamcontrol (auto-transcript spellings that may not be exact), shared what he describes as a long and profound connection across generations. They revealed many different tantric practices together, the teacher says, and those practices are divided into outer, inner and secret categories.
The practice being taught on this night is, in the teacher's words, the outer practice of the Tara tradition, which he places within the family of yoga tantra. He is candid that he has not had time to go through the full manual and has been drawing out pieces of it. That candor matters. The teacher is not presenting the Lexosum as a closed doctrinal system. He is presenting it as a text whose logic he is still unpacking in front of the audience, which is part of what makes the livestream feel less like a lecture and more like a working session.
The organizing idea, which the teacher repeats in several forms, is the phrase "good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end." He says it is a framework that suits Mahayana practice especially well, and that practitioners who follow the Mahayana path need all three phases. Each phase has a specific job. Skip one, and the teacher implies, the practice loses its shape.
The first phase is the generation of bodhicitta, which the teacher calls the precious mind of enlightenment. Its object is the welfare of all sentient beings, a vast field the teacher describes as extending as far as space itself. On the surface, he acknowledges, this can sound like an ordinary wish to do good. He is careful to separate it from that. Building schools and hospitals and giving food are worthwhile, he says, but they are not the deepest benefit. The deepest benefit is that beings come to understand the fundamental nature of all phenomena.
The teacher, in the 21 Tara Puja 2026 livestream (around the 4:48 mark): if sentient beings can understand that fundamental nature, then whatever other help we give them has a foundation under it. Without that understanding, he argues, the nature of samsara is suffering, and material help alone cannot carry anyone beyond it.
This is the logic that makes the beginning of the practice more than a warm-up. The teacher's argument is that suffering is not solved at the level of circumstances. A hospital cures a disease; it does not end the cycle that produces disease. So the motivation at the start of the puja is aimed at liberation rather than comfort, and the practitioner is asked to hold that aim before anything else happens in the session.
The teacher also makes a point about the economics of intention. Around the 6:40 mark he uses an analogy he attributes to a classical master, rendered in the transcript as Sakapanita (most likely Sakya Pandita, though the auto-transcript is unreliable here). Two people own a field. One plants seed; the other does not. Only the first has a harvest. The teacher's application is direct: bodhicitta is the seed, and it keeps working. He goes so far as to say that a person with this motivation is accumulating merit even while asleep. Whether one reads that literally or as a statement about the continuity of intention, the point is that the motivation is meant to outlast the ritual.
Within the same passage the teacher makes an observation that many practitioners will recognize. Negative actions, he says, seem to come more easily to us largely because of habit; we have a long practice of accumulating negativity. Yet the nature of the mind, in his account, makes positive action easier in principle. Killing or lying takes effort and leaves consequences. Positive action, especially when it is embraced with bodhicitta, becomes, in his phrase, "extraordinarily vast and powerful." It is a claim worth sitting with, because it reframes the daily struggle of practice not as swimming upstream against a fundamentally bad nature but as correcting a habit.
The middle phase is the absence of a reference point, which the teacher calls one of the most vast topics in the tradition. He is honest that its full treatment belongs to students who have studied the Madhyamaka and Prajnaparamita literature, and he offers a simplified entry for lay practitioners. At the ordinary level, he says, it means the absence of pride and arrogance, the loosening of the self-importance that makes us reach for status. At a deeper level, it means recognizing that everything we experience is produced by mind.
This is where the Tara visualization comes in, and the teacher's instructions are specific. The practitioner brings Tara to mind, either by remembering her physical form or by recalling a mantra, or by thinking of any of the various forms of Tara. He says it is enough simply to remember her. The practitioner then imagines her in the space in front of them, offers her the usual offerings, and invokes her. From her body, the teacher says, nectar descends and enters the practitioner, blessing them. At the end, Tara dissolves into the practitioner and becomes one with them, the same as the practitioner's own nature.
On how to hold the visualization, the teacher says (around the 9:45 mark) that practitioners trained in the Mahamudra and Dzogchen traditions can, at a certain level of practice, rest without creating or fabricating anything at all. Some of the time, he says, you bring to mind the confidence that you are the noble Tara; at other times no effort is needed, and you simply relate naturally to being Tara.
The teacher adds a caution that deserves emphasis for newer practitioners. He insists that Tara should not be understood as a deity in the mold of a god who keeps a ledger of human behavior and punishes wrongdoing. Tara, in his description, is best understood as the clear light, devoid of inherent existence. The visualization is a means of recognizing emptiness, not a way of appeasing an external judge. Without that distinction, the teacher suggests, devotion can slide into a transactional relationship that misses the point of the practice entirely.
The final phase is dedication: giving the merit accumulated in the session to all sentient beings, "as vast as space," so that they may reach complete enlightenment. The teacher treats this not as a closing formality but as a safeguard. If a practice is sealed with dedication and aspiration, he says, then even if a serious negative action follows, it will not destroy the root of virtue the practice has built. Dedication, in this reading, is a kind of insurance on the good that has been done, and it is also the moment where the opening bodhicitta is returned to the same field it began with.
Near the close of the livestream, the teacher moves from teaching into the ritual's conclusion. He offers the blessing water of Tara, says the authorization and blessing are complete, and asks the assembled practitioners to repeat their commitment and to offer their body, wealth and merit. The shift is abrupt, and it shows the structure at work: the teaching has set the motivation and the view, and the ritual gives the practitioner something to carry out of the room.
Watching the full recording, a viewer will notice that the teacher is less interested in impressing with doctrine than in making the structure legible. Beginning, middle and end; seed, recognition and harvest; motivation, emptiness and dedication. Each piece is a reminder of what the practice is for. The transcript is auto-generated and sometimes garbled, particularly around names and Sanskrit and Tibetan terms, so readers who want exact terminology should consult the original recording or a published translation. The architecture, though, comes through clearly, and it is the reason a Tara puja can be more than a ritual performed on a schedule.
To hear the teacher's own voice on these points, watch the full 21 Tara Puja 2026 livestream from the Siddhartha's Intent channel, particularly the opening passage on the three phases and the middle section on the absence of a reference point. If you are new to the practice, start with the teacher's explanation of bodhicitta and the field analogy before attempting the visualization. For anyone who wants to go deeper into the Madhyamaka and Prajnaparamita background the teacher says is necessary for the middle phase, his own remark that these are vast subjects is a good signal to study them with a qualified teacher rather than rely on a single livestream.
