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A mantra is a religious syllable or poem, typically from the Sanskrit language. Their use varies according to the school and philosophy associated with the mantra. They are primarily used as spiritual conduits, words and vibrations that instill one-pointed concentration in the devotee. Other purposes have included religious ceremonies to accumulating wealth, avoiding danger, or eliminating enemies. Mantras originated in India with Vedic Hinduism and were later adopted by Buddhists and Jains, now popular in various modern forms of spiritual practice which are loosely based on practices of these Eastern religions.
Mantras have some features in common with spells in general, in that they are a translation of the human will or desire into a form of action. Indeed, Dr. Edward Conze, a scholar of Buddhism, frequently translated "mantra" as "spell". As symbols, sounds are seen to effect what they symbolise. Vocal sounds are frequently thought of as having magical powers, or even of representing the words or speech of a deity. For the authors of the Hindu scriptures of the Upanishads, the syllable AumAum (also Om is the most sacred syllable in Hinduism, in which Vedic tradition it originated. The syllable is sometimes referred to as, "the Udgitha or "pranava mantra" (primordial mantra). As a seed syllable bija , it is also considered holy in Esoteric, itself constituting a mantra, represents BrahmanThis article is about the concept of transcendent reality in Hinduism. See also Brahmin and Brahman (disambiguation). In the Vedantic (and subsequently Yogic) schools of Hinduism, Brahman is the signifying name given to the concept of the unchanging, infi, the godhead, as well as the whole of creation. Merely pronouncing this syllable is to experience the divine in a very direct way. KukaiKukai or Kobo-Daishi , 774— 835 CE: Japanese monk, scholar, and artist, founder of the Shingon or True Word school of Buddhism. Kukai is famous as a calligrapher, engineer and is said to have invented kana, the syllabary in which, in combination with Chin suggests that all sounds are the voice of the DharmakayaThe Trikaya doctrine ( Sanskrit, literally "Three bodies or personalities"; Chinese: Snshen Japanese: sanjin is an important Buddhist teaching both on the nature of reality, and what a Buddha is. By the 4th century CE the Trikaya Doctrine had assumed the BuddhaBuddha ( Sanskrit, Pali, others: literally Awakened One Enlightened One from the Sanskrit: "√budh", to awaken can refer to the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama or to anyone who has attained the same depth and quality of enlightenment. Buddhism -- i.e. as in Hindu Upanishadic and Yogic thought, these sounds are manifestations of ultimate reality. We should not think that this is peculiar to Eastern culture, however. Words do have a mysterious power to affect us. Accepted scholarly etymologyEtymology is the study of the origins of words. Some words have been derived from other languages, possibly in a changed form (the source words are called etymons . Through old texts and comparisons with other languages, etymologists try to reconstruct th links the word with "manas" meaning "mind" and 'trâna' for protection so that a mantra is something which protects the mind -- however in practice we will see that mantra is considered to do far more than simply protect the mind.
For many cultures it is the written letters that have power -- the Hebrew Kabbalah for instance, or the Anglo-Saxon Runes. Letters can have an oracular function even. But in India special conditions applied that meant that writing was very definitely inferior to the spoken word. The Brahmins were the priestly caste of the Aryan peoples. It was they that preserved the holy writings -- initially the Vedas, but later also the Upanishads. For years, they were the only ones who knew the mantras or sacred formulas that had to be chanted at every important occasion. However, with the advent of egalitarian Hindu schools of Yoga, Vedanta, Tantra and Bhakti, it is now the case that intra-family and community mantras are passed on freely as part of generally practiced Hindu religion. Such was the influence of the more orthodox attitude of the elite nature of mantra knowledge that even the Buddhists, who repudiated the whole idea of caste, and of the efficacy of the old rituals, called themselves the shravakas, that is "the hearers". A wise person in India was one who had "heard much".Mantras then are sound symbols. What they symbolise, and how they function depends on the context, and the mind of the person repeating them. Studies in sound symbolism suggest that vocal sounds have meaning whether we are aware of it or not. And indeed that there can be multiple layers of symbolism associated with each sound. So even if we do not understand them, mantras are no simply meaningless mumbo jumbo -- no vocal utterance is entirely without meaning. We can look at mantra is a range of different contexts to see what they can mean in those contexts: Om may mean something quite different to a Hindu and a Tibetan Buddhist. The analysis of Kukai, a 9th century Japanese Buddhist is revealing. See below.
While Hindu tantras eventually came to see the letters as well as the sounds as representatives of the divine, it was when Buddhism travelled to China that a major shift in emphasis towards writing came about. China lacked a unifying, ecclesiastic language like Sanskrit, and achieved its cultural unity by having a written language that was flexible in pronunciation but more precise in terms of the concepts that each character represented. In fact the Indians had several scripts which were all equally serviceable for writing Sanskrit. Hence the Chinese prized written language much more highly than did the Indian Buddhist missionaries, and the writing of mantras became a spiritual practice in its own right. So that whereas Brahmins had been very strict on correct pronunciation, the Chinese, and indeed other Far-Eastern Buddhists were less concerned with this than correctly writing something down. The practice of writing mantras, and copying texts as a spiritual practice, became very refined in Japan, and the writing in the Siddham script in which the Sanskrit of many Buddhist Sutras where written is only really seen in Japan nowadays. However, written mantra-repetition in Hindu practices, with Sanskrit in any number of scripts, is well-known to many sects in India as well.