The Significance of the Buddhist Mantra

The Significance of the Buddhist Mantra

In Dharamsala, India, in an open square, a Tibetan refugee sits exposed to the full force of the sun. His skin is baked brown and wrinkled from many afternoons such as this one. He is thin as a rail, and his legs fold beneath him in a way that looks painful to the westerners who pass him. He wears tattered rags and looks unwashed, but sports a long white beard—a prized rarity among Tibetans. His eyes, blind and white as his beard, stare placidly into the distance, then flutter as he lifts his head and begins to chant. "Om mani peme hung," he calls. "Om mani peme hung."

Two Americans, a couple from New Jersey, witness this spectacle and are entranced. The man, after much prodding from his wife, shyly approaches the yogin and says to him, "That is a magnificent sound you just made. Is it a song?"

"It is mantra," he answers in stilted English.

The man and woman go aaahhh and nod their heads at one another. "What does it mean?" the husband asks.

"My mantra purifies the six realms of samsara," the refugee tells them. "It speeds gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings alike on the path to enlightenment."

The Americans are suitably impressed, and return satisfied to their rooms in the city. Later that night, though, the man realizes that he has not learned the meaning of the mantra. The next day he returns to the square to find the yogin sitting in the same spot, chanting as he did the day before. "Tell me, what does your mantra mean?" he asks.

The blind man replies "Om, with its three letters A, U, and M, is like the perfect body, mind, and speech of the Buddha. Mani is the precious jewel of compassion; peme is the lotus which rises from the mud of ig...

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...dio aesthetics. They deliberately left considerations of meaning out of the process of formulating mantras (believing that meaning works counter to the power of the mantra, rather than for it), and instead the relied on the "spontaneous truth" they experienced through it—that is, their initial aesthetic reaction to it.

Works Cited

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Kindness, Clarity, and Insight. Snow Lion, Ithaca, NY, 1988.

Govinda, Anagarika Brahmacari. Foundations of Tibetan mysticism, according to the esoteric teachings of the Great Mantra, Om Mani Padme H um. New York, Dutton, 1960.

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry. Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1994.

http://www.somtel.com/~drago/seuss/Wocket.html

http://www.tibet.com/Humanrights/EduToday/chap2.html