The Great Mantras

The third volume guarded the esoteric mantra behind its locks. This chapter steps into the open, to the mantras that are not secret at all, the ones carved over temple doors and sung in millions of homes and shouted in the streets at festivals. These are the great living mantras, and the tradition holds them out freely, because their power, in the devotional understanding, is meant to be shared. This treatise will name them and tell their stories and stop short of any rite, as it has throughout. To name the great mantras is to map the devotional heart of the whole tradition.

The five syllables of Shiva

The supreme Shaiva mantra is the Panchakshara, “the five syllables”: Namah Shivaya, “homage to Shiva,” most often recited with the pranava before it as Om Namah Shivaya. Five syllables, na-mah-shi-va-ya, and the tradition reads worlds into them, mapping the five to the five elements, earth and water and fire and air and ether, so that to say the mantra is to offer the whole material world back to its lord. And it is not a late invention. Its core sits in the Namakam of the Shri Rudram, the great hymn to Rudra in the Krishna Yajurveda, which gives the Panchakshara a Vedic root reaching back to the oldest layer of sacred sound this treatise described. The five syllables run from the Veda’s fire-altar to the lips of a villager today, unbroken.

The names of Vishnu

The Vaishnava world has its own great pair, both built on the pattern of Om, then “homage,” then the name of the Lord. The Ashtakshara, “the eight syllables,” is Om Namo Narayanaya, “homage to Narayana,” the supreme name of Vishnu as the ground of all being. The Dvadashakshara, “the twelve syllables,” is Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya, “homage to the Lord Vasudeva,” Krishna, described in the Bhagavata tradition as a foremost mantra of liberation. Where the Shaiva Panchakshara offers the elements to Shiva, the Vaishnava mantras take refuge in the Name of the Lord, and the grammar of refuge, namah, “I bow, I am not my own,” is the devotional heart of both.

The verse against death

One mantra stands somewhat apart, neither a seed-syllable nor a name but a whole Vedic verse, recited across sectarian lines for protection and healing. It is the Mahamrityunjaya, “the great death-conquering” mantra, also called the Tryambakam verse from its opening word, and it is Rigveda 7.59.12. It addresses Tryambaka, “the three-eyed,” an epithet the tradition identifies with Rudra-Shiva, though an honest note adds that the verse sits in a hymn to the Maruts and the Shaiva reading is a later identification. Griffith’s public-domain translation gives its haunting image of release:

“Tryambaka we worship, sweet augmenter of prosperity. As from its stem the cucumber, so may I be released from death, not reft of immortality.”

As a ripe cucumber falls from the vine, easily, in its own time, severed without violence from the stem that held it, so may the one who prays be released, when the time comes, from death, and not torn from the deathless. It is among the most beloved verses in living use, recited for the sick and the endangered and the dying. This treatise records its place and makes no medical or therapeutic claim for it; what it offers the tradition is consolation and courage, the facing of death with a sound in the mouth.

The great mantra of the Name

And then there is the mantra that is almost nothing but the Name, repeated, and that has carried further across the modern world than any other. The maha-mantra, “the great mantra,” is the sixteen-word Vaishnava formula built from three divine names, Hare, Krishna, and Rama, woven together. Its oldest textual home is a short, late Upanishad, the Kali-Santarana, “the crossing-over of the Kali age,” whose very title states its claim: that this mantra is the boat across the dark age. It rose to its great prominence through Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the ecstatic sixteenth-century Bengali saint who made the communal singing of the divine names, nama-sankirtana, the center of a whole devotional movement, and in the twentieth century it travelled out of India to become, through the Gaudiya mission from 1966 onward, one of the most recognized Hindu sounds on earth.

The maha-mantra marks the end of an arc this whole treatise has traced. We began with the Word as the Absolute, climbed through the heard Veda and the Tantric seed, and arrive here at the simplest thing of all: the Name of the beloved, sung over and over, by anyone, with no initiation, no fire, no secret. From shabda-brahman to a name shouted in joy in the street. The tradition holds that the descent is also an ascent, that in the dark age the highest practice is the most available one, the Name freely given and freely sung.

From seed to Name

Lay the great mantras in a line and the movement is visible. The seed-syllable concentrates a deity into a single guarded sound, received from a guru. The Panchakshara and the Ashtakshara open the deity’s name to anyone who will bow. The Mahamrityunjaya sets a whole Vedic verse on the lips against death. And the maha-mantra dissolves into pure Name, sung in chorus, needing nothing. The trajectory runs from the most concentrated and esoteric toward the most expansive and shared, from the seed locked in the jar to the Name scattered like rain.

Why the Name should be enough, and what becomes of all this sound in the modern world, is the subject of the last chapter, which closes the treatise.

From the five syllables on the fire-altar to a name sung in the street.

The same sound, reaching for the same source, by every door at once.