The rites held to make a mantra efficacious, as distinct from the extraction that supplies its syllables. The Netratantra gives nine, naming them as kindling, awakening, striking, consecrating, cleansing, fuelling, satisfying, concealing and nourishing. The Saradatilaka gives ten, which are not those nine with extras: it keeps eight of them, drops the fuelling, and adds two preliminaries at the outset, janana or birth and jivana or vivifying. Ksemaraja quotes a tantra that counts seven. Gudrun Buhnemann's 1991 study pairs this perfecting of a mantra with its selection as the two halves of one process, and Andre Padoux notes that the Saradatilaka's janana is itself a variant of mantroddhara, so the extraction counts in that text as the first of the rites rather than as something prior to them.

Where this term appears

• Mantroddhara: the key printed above the lock Lineages →

  Something else was, and Bühnemann's title named it: perfecting. Mantrasaṃskāra is the set of rites held to make a mantra work.

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