The Mantra and the Deity

We have reached the claim that the whole of the Tantric science of sound exists to make. The last two chapters laid the ground: the alphabet is the Goddess, and a seed-syllable concentrates a deity into a single sound. Now the conclusion, stated without hedging.

In Tantra, the mantra does not refer to the deity. The mantra is the deity.

Not a name, not a prayer

Hold this against the two more familiar ways of relating words to gods, both of which the first volume already distinguished. A name points: “Shiva” is a label that picks out a god, the way “Everest” picks out a mountain, and the label could in principle be different. A prayer addresses: it assumes the god is there and the worshipper is here, and the words cross the gap. The Tantric mantra is neither. It is mantra-devata, the mantra-deity: the god’s own body, in the form of sound. There is no gap for a prayer to cross, because the mantra is not aimed at the deity from outside; it is the deity, present as sound. There is no arbitrariness of a label, because the sound is not a sign chosen by convention; it is the deity’s own substance.

This follows directly, link by link, from the chain Woodroffe set down and the last chapters unfolded. Mantras are made of letters; letters are Matrika; Matrika is Shakti; Shakti is Shiva. If each step holds, the conclusion is forced: the deity and the mantra, both being letters, both being the one power, are one. The mantra is the deity in the body of sound, and to sound it rightly is to make that body present.

One deity, three densities

The Tantra completes the picture by setting the mantra among two companions, and the three together form one of the most elegant ideas in the tradition. A single deity can be met in three forms, which are one reality at three densities.

The mantra is the deity as sound, the subtlest of the three, the deity’s sound-body. The yantra is the deity as geometric form, the diagram, denser than sound but still abstract, the deity drawn as pure pattern, as the treatise on Sri Vidya describes for Tripura Sundari. And the murti, the image, is the deity as shape, the densest of the three, the form the eye can rest on and the hand can bathe and clothe and feed. Sound, diagram, image: the same divine reality, descending through three degrees of density, from the heard to the drawn to the seen. The mantra is not a lesser thing than the temple image. It is the same deity, subtler, closer to the source, the god in the form that is nearest to pure power.

This is why, in Tantric worship, the three are used together and treated as interchangeable expressions of one presence. The image is installed, the yantra is drawn, and the mantra is sounded, and they are three densities of one present god, rather than three approaches to a distant one.

Why the mind is reshaped by the sound

There is a working principle underneath all of this, and it explains why mantra is a practice and not merely a doctrine. The tradition holds that the mind takes the shape of whatever it dwells on. Attend long enough to anger and the mind becomes angry; attend long enough to a beloved and the mind is filled with the beloved’s form. This is observable, and the Tantra builds on it. If the mind becomes what it dwells on, and if the mantra is the deity’s own sound-body, then to dwell in the mantra, to repeat it, to let it sound continuously in the mind, is to give the mind the deity’s shape, over and over, until the worshipper becomes progressively of that nature. The mantra is the deity offered to the mind as a form to take. Repetition is the slow reshaping of the one who repeats into the likeness of what is repeated.

This is the bridge to the fourth volume, on the discipline of repetition. The metaphysics says the mantra is the deity in sound. The practice says: then dwell in that sound until you are remade by it.

Not senseless

It would be easy, and lazy, to file this whole doctrine under superstition, the primitive idea that a magic sound compels a god. The tradition, and its careful expositors, anticipated the charge and answered it, and a serious account should let them. Sir John Woodroffe wrote his long study of mantra-shastra, the public-domain Garland of Letters, expressly to show, in his words, that the use of mantra is not senseless superstition. His argument is the one this volume has been building: the doctrine is not a claim about magic words but a consequence of a coherent metaphysics of sound. If reality is at its ground the Word, and if the letters are the powers from which the world is woven, then a mantra made of those letters is made of the same substance as the deity and the cosmos, and to sound it is to work at the root of things, not to cast a spell on the surface. One may accept or reject that metaphysics. One may not honestly call it senseless, because it is not. It is a rigorous philosophy of sound carried to its conclusion.

There is, however, a catch built into the whole system, a lock on the door. The mantra is the deity in sound, yes, but not for everyone who happens to say it. A mantra read off a page, in the tradition’s own teaching, is inert. It has to be made alive, and only one thing can do that.

That is the last chapter of this volume.

The mantra is not a word about the god.

It is the god, slowed to a sound the mouth can hold.