Visible Mantra : Buddhist Calligraphy

A resource for visualising and calligraphy of
Buddhist mantras and seed syllables.

Support Visible Mantra

A donation of just 50p per year from each person visiting visiblemantra.org would easily support Jayarava to work full-time on this and other Visible Mantra projects.

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Other projects in the pipeline include the Visible Mantra Book, a Siddhaṃ primer, and a history of Mantra in Buddhism. See also Jayarava's Blog.

My thanks to those generous people who've already given, I'm touched to find that people often want to give more than 50p!

Mantras are the mysterious sound symbols associated with Indian spiritual practice. We often ask "what does a mantra mean?", but a better question is what does it do? A Buddhist mantra evokes and invokes qualities of the Awakened mind. Mantras bring us into relationship with Enlightenment, and are a vehicle by which our consciousness can awaken to the way things really are. They are rooted in age old traditions emphasising the interconnectedness of all things. For Buddhists a mantra may also be an expression of devotion towards, or faith in, the Three Jewels.

As writing encapsulates sounds, so a written mantra captures something of the symbolism of the mantric sound. Visible Mantra presents calligraphy of the seed syllables (bīja) and mantras used in the most common Buddhist visualisation and devotional practices performed in the Triratna Buddhist Order. Additional mantras from the Shingon School and Tibetan lineages are included. The main script used on Visible Mantra is Siddhaṃ, but it also features Tibetan, and Lantsa/Ranjana examples.