Countless aeons ago, in a time beyond the beginning of our time, a princess named Yeshe Dawa, developed great faith in and devotion toward the buddha. When, by virtue of her vast accumulations of merit and pristine awareness, the thought of supreme enlightenment awakened in her, the monks of the realm advised her to pray for rebirth in a male body, for they thought that such a body would be a superior vehicle for enlightenment.
Because Yeshe Dawa had realized the empty nature of all phenomena, she recognized that there was no inherent reality in either the male body or the female body. Confronted by the relative reality of ignorant insistence on such differentiations, however, she made the commitment always to take rebirth in female form. Having attained enlightenment, she manifests in our world as Tara the Liberator.