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On the General Doctrine of Mantras

We have often employed the term mantra in the previous pages. From a practical point of view, Luce has already implicitly discussed it in reference to the “Names of Power” and the “Signatures” (see chapter III). However, it is opportune to lay out some theoretical elements, proper to traditional Hinduism.¹⁷⁴ An analogous exposition would also be possible from the perspective of the Kabbalistic tradition, and would also engender interesting comparisons.

In order to understand what a mantra is, it is necessary to adopt the perspective that considers all things in function of sound and movement. Everything in the universe is a vibration; this vibration has the living sense of speaking, of expressing the invisible world. It is movement as sounding word and revealing Logos.

However, in the experience of the word we can distinguish three elements: the mere sound, or “voice” (vâkshabda = logos); hearing (pratyaya); and “meaning,” namely the object evoked by any voice in those who hear.

If we extend analogically the experience of the word known by men, and if we properly interpret its elements, the doctrine of mantras seeks to give an account of the process of manifestation. From this results a particular interpretation of the traditional theory of the three worlds—or, better said, of the three main conditions of being, corresponding to three forms of possible experience. We must not forget that Oriental metaphysics never deals, as modern philosophy does, with “concepts,” but rather with experiences that it does not invent, but merely expounds upon from the basis of the authority of those who have seen (rshi).

The base experience and the supreme state is the absolute and infinite identity (brahman). It IS, eternal, without possibility of change, without name or form, ungraspable—it simultaneously “proceeds” (prasarati), determining a logos, and logoi, sound, and sounds; it evolves in the experience of a qualified world, with a duality of subject (aham) and object (idam), with different degrees of light, with various beings, both glorious and dark, beautiful and not beautiful, worthy and unworthy, subject to generation, change, and decay. As such it is shabdabrahman (i.e., brahman in the form of Word). It is a Wind that carries the Unmoved, the Soundless, the Ineffable, that which remains what it is as the light of the Great Game, center of the Dance, axis of the Wheel.

Thus, as the first state and as the supreme condition we may posit the experience of this duality-unity. The Word is first of all a mass of pure sound, radiant energy, constituting the so-called vajra-âkâsha, the ether of the “Diamond-Thunderbolt.” The “meaning,” or artha, of this primordial “Word,” of this formless thunderbolt, is the supreme and hidden brahman. And yet the two are one. There is no room for an apprehension, or for pratyaya: here expression is immediate revelation—or better, self-revelation—spirit, eternal sense. Artha and shabda are one and the same. The well-known sacred syllable OM corresponds analogically to this primordial sound, wind, sound of sounds, which shatters the equilibrium of creative powers.

The state that hierarchically follows the supreme sound (pârashabda), is the subtle sound (sûkshma-shabda). Here the sonorous block is qualified, is pronounced in “letters,” resounds in logoi, chisels moving figures in the homogenous mass of radiant ether, and determines “assignments” (tanmâtra). A world of “gods” (devatâ) awakens: powers of things in forms not yet materialized or yet made act, in bodies substantiated by rhythms that constitute the subtle sounds of particular gestures vibrating in a space that is not yet the physical one, echoing like words in an incorruptible, eternal ear. The shabda-brahman, namely Brahman as Word, manifests itself in these living and immaterial powers, which are different modes of being that, as pâra-shabda, are contained in it as in a “whole” (pûrna). Each of them carries a degree, an aspect, a seal of the supreme “meaning”: the “partial meanings” in them, though they do not yet separate themselves, in a certain sense are distinguished from what in them is properly word or sound (shabda). These are, so to speak, the souls, the “spirits,” the Selves of the sounding bodies, or words, in which they are pronounced.¹⁷⁵

When we talk about mantras (in the proper sense), we allude to these “bodies”; thus they allegedly are “Voices,” the correlative sense of which is not a thing, nor the image of a God, but the God himself, in his form made of consciousness (cid-rûpinî). Here the voice is not separated from the object, nor is this outside of the sound: the mantra is the God, and the perceptive or expressive actualization (pratyaya) of the mantra directly constitutes the presence, the being of its God (artha). However, the God is the still aspect, the aspect of “silence,” identity, form of pure flashing (yjotirmayî) that burst out from that act, that nexus of rhythm or motion, which constitutes its mantra.

These articulations of the “hidden Sound” on the subtle plane are the Second Mothers, or the incorruptible and generating (mâtrkâ, matrices) “Letters.” From their combination, variation, and interaction, the doctrine says that all things and all beings of the universe are formed. However, not as they appear in sensible experience, but as they are in their causes. Such are their “Names”—in Western terminology, their signatures (signaturae rerum). The Name would be the sound produced by the subtle force that generates or constitutes a thing or a being, but not as it echoes in physical air, but as it is directly perceived by the spirit in an inner ether, free of the restrictions of space and time, under the species of movement-in-itself, of pure, “continuous,” homogeneous sound, rather than of material vibrations.

The names and the mantras are called radical or seminal (bîjâ) if they represent a given element as synthesis-essence, as a “whole”; they are called secondary if they only fix a particular virtue of theirs. For instance, the bîjâmantra of Fire is RAM,¹⁷⁶ whereas the “vortex” aspect of Fire is expressed by AG, its purifying element by PÛ, and the consuming aspect by HU or ASH.

From the supreme state we have gone to the causal and subtle one.¹⁷⁷ From this we pass to the last state, to the material form of sound (sthûlashabda). Here the Word assumes the species of the spoken word, which is physically audible (vaikharî-shabda); what occurs, then, is the law of duality proper to the complete manifestation. The Names and the subtle sounds are pronounced and projected into objects and living consciousnesses (jîva). The three elements of a word—meaning, voice, and apprehension—are separated and become independent from one another. The artha is no longer a meaning or “light,” but the object of which the word knows only how to evoke the external image through conventional meanings, mental associations, memories. The relation proper to the apprehension, to the pratyaya, is no longer essential, nor creative: it is no longer the “act” that captures the object in itself, in an intellectual transparency. It is based on data of the senses (âpta), rather than proceeding from an active and direct intuition of the spirit (sâkshâtkrta). While before the names constituted a Universal Language, which conveyed things as they are in themselves through a unique and absolute expression, now they are degenerated into the multiplicity of accidental and corruptible expressions designating them in various languages.

This is the material form of the word, which is the only one known to man. In his ignorance, he thinks that such a physical form exhausts the word; he knows nothing about the subtle form, nor of the causative and supreme forms that are asleep in the word itself—as well in physical movements—and without which the very thing that he knows would not exist or only be an incoherent sound.

In the doctrine discussed here, the very sound of sounds, OM, being everywhere, is also found in the body of men as the ultimate hidden depth of the force that animates them, gives them form, light, and resolve of the will. This is where we find the magical doctrine (mâyâ-vâda) of mantras in the narrow and practical sense. In short, it leads to a RESURRECTION OF THE LIVING WORD, to an awakening of the sound, in order that the “figures” made of pure actuality, which correspond to the subtle plane, may finally appear denuded of their sensible, corruptible, contingent form. According to a symbolical etymology, the term mantra derives from man (manana = to think) and tra (trâyate = to preserve). This etymology points to an act of the mind in which the word is “preserved” or maintained in its primordial state.

No human word can, as such, be a mantra. However, due to certain occult laws of harmony (candah), certain archaic and sacred sounds are like a trace or echo of the mantras and of their artha. The practice of Mantra Yoga aims at awakening, from the material shape (shtûla-rûpa) of these sounds, their subtle form, the syllables of “light” corresponding to them.

No illusions should, however, be harbored. The texts clearly say that it is possible to practice japa (namely to repeat a mantra) a million times, but unless it is known, it remains a mere flapping of the lips. The enunciation of a mantra is essentially an act of the spirit, in which that moment of enlightenment and of inner awareness that arises every time one says, “I have understood,” is taken to a higher plane and purified from any material residue. It is only at that point that the mantra awakens and “acts.” The material enunciation becomes a vehicle of a magical or evocatory power only on this condition. Thus it is said that it is almost impossible to know the enunciation of a mantra unless one first learns it directly from a Master.

The repetition (japa) must be understood as “repeatedly shaking a sleeping person, until he wakes up.” In some schools the auxiliary mantra IM is repeated seven times before and after japa in order to facilitate the fluidification of the main mantra. This is called nidrâ-bhanga (destruction of sleep). More specific instructions are given in the order of chakra-vâda, namely of the doctrine concerning the “power points” (chakras) found in the human body. The body, according to esoteric teaching in general, includes all the elements, in its dark depth eluding the ordinary wakeful consciousness. At the root of the body’s vital force, in its subtle form, lies OM itself, which is the substance of all mantras. Thus the mantras of the various natural elements echo in particular qualifications of this force within the organism. Earth, water, fire, air, ether are sympathetically connected with fluid currents (nâdî), originating from five “life points,” roughly corresponding to the sacral, prostatic, solar, cardiac, and laryngeal plexi. The corresponding bîjâ-mantra are LAM, VAM, RAM, YAM, HAM. The uttering of one of these bîja “touches” the center corresponding to it, activating its fluid current. Vice versa, by transferring and fixing the mental fire in one of these centers as the consciousness attempts to assume the form of the mantra, the awakening or the “flowering” (sphota) of the mantra is facilitated.

What galvanizes the mantra is the spiritual strength of the operator (sâdhaka-shakti). However, the virtue of the mantra is not only based on that. The mantra includes its own power, which, after joining the sâdhakashakti, exalts it, multiplies it, and makes it achieve a “leap” to a higher plane. Metaphysically speaking, this force of the mantra is not substantially different from the operator’s, since the subtle sound and the material sound are not two different things, but two forms or states of the same thing. However, this energy in the effort of the operator is awkward, uncertain, and limited by the general conditions of individual existence: the mantra rectifies it, integrates it, stabilizes it, determining a further current of strength and of illumination that connects to the previous one, completing the transformation.

Thus, one text uses the image of a certain quantity of liquid that is rapidly added to that already found in a container, causing it to overflow. In another text, the sâdhaka-shakti is compared to fire. Just as air waves, when they meet a flame, increase its strength, likewise the energy of the operator, when it is hit by the mantra’s shakti, grows rapidly and becomes very efficacious. In theory, at the time of the full realization of a mantra, the virtue of the individual practitioner is transformed into the virtue of the god presiding over it: he virtually becomes capable of anything this god is.

The Names and the mantras are liable to a double experimental verification: a) given a thing, the supersensible, yogic perception of the “sound” of the movement of that thing must correspond, approximately and analogically, to the mantra; b) vice versa, the right utterance of an entirely vivified mantra should produce the apparition of that corresponding thing or element.

Thus, if the mantra puts one in contact with the subtle plane, and if the latter is the plane of acts that sustain the sensible and material apparitions of things, and thus sustain those very things that are believed to be “inanimate,” by vibrating a command in a mantra, it will bring about a magical realization. This, of course occurs at the risk and peril of the operator, in the sense that he must first consider whether he has the necessary strength to make the female () of the corresponding fluidic vortex (which also echoes, among other things, in the occult life currents of his organism, which now emerge from the depth of the “centers”), while he himself is the before it and the concomitant reactions. This is the condition for the success of the operation, in the magical sense.

In general, in the awakened mantra the presence of the so-called “form of light” (jyotirmayî) is developed. The latter is said to be “liberation”: as we have seen, it stands in relation to the rhythmic body of the mantra itself as meaning (artha) stands to the mere letter, word, or sound (shabda). These presences do not themselves resound: they are “silences” standing in counterpoint to the pattern of subtle sounds. They lead to that which in the word is even deeper than qualification. When they are known in this manner, all the waves, the syncopes, and the shadows vanish; one then achieves the experience of vajra-âkâsha, the naked homogeneous ether of a word that is diamond-thunderbolt, and whose sign is . The “emptiness” (shûnyatâ) enclosed in the circle indicates something in relation to which this vajra state stands like a sound, corporeity, and incorporeity. It is Brahman, the supreme state.

From the point of view of mantra-vâda we may say: that which is at the base of things and commonly called “reality” is but a symbol. Man moves among symbols, and is himself a symbol, including his form, his speech, everything that he does.

In the sensible world, man find himself confronted by an alphabet or a system of signs, of which, due to a mysterious amnesia, he is ignorant both of the pronunciation and the meaning. Thus even its symbolic meaning eludes him. In the subtle world, it is the “state of pronunciation” that awakens in one’s consciousness: from the sign emerges the memory of the word, of the sound—one no longer perceives forms and material bodies, but rather rhythms and gestures. Finally, the causal world (kârana: the “intellectual world,” the κoσμος νοητoς of neo-Platonism, the Sophar of the Kabbalah) is the state of the sound that transcends itself and is perceived as a “meaning.” The three worlds are in reality one world: they are different “perceptive faculties” of an identity, or degrees of light in the same landscape. The Self knows one or the other, depending on its attitude, and on the degree of light and inner awakening that it can bring to life in itself.

He who succeeds in mastering the “meaning” of things has the key to high magic. It all consists in achieving a state of intelligence, of significance before things. He who has comprehended a thing will also be able to utter it. This utterance is to “resolve” it as a thing and to virtually establish a magical relationship with it. Then the human word resurrects as Logos, or as a living word. Then words become virtue and truth. The mantras are mysterious flashes of this resurrection that are mysteriously trapped and dormant inside some archaic, hieratic, and primordial voices.