Tibetan Cymbal Symbols

A friend recently wrote to me:

Please could you tell me what my cymbals say?

I've been taking these cymbals into prison for over 15 years, to ding meditation stages. Occasionally, someone asks me what the symbols mean. I confidently reply that it is the Avalokiteshvara mantra.

Only, last week a bright spark asked if it says "om mani padme hum" how come there are seven symbols rather than six?

The answer is quite simple. It is the Avalokiteśvara mantra written in a Tibetan script called dbu-can (pronounced uchen) - the main formal script they use for texts and printing. The extra symbol is a paragraph marker, known as a 'shed' in Tibetan. It's more often a simple vertical stroke, but sometimes a colon-like thing as you have here.

oṃ ma ṇi pad me hūṃ :

I've added the letters onto your image so you can see which is which. While we're on the subject there is no word break in maṇipadme - it is a single compound word meaning, most likely "in the jewelled lotus" (but clearly not "the jewel in the lotus" as Sanskrit grammar does not allow this meaning, despite it's popularity). I've written about this on my blog post "The Meaning of oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ".

Note the Tibetans write "pa dme" as "pad me" because it looks more Tibetan. In the image below the top line is what is on your bells, and the bottom line is the proper Sanskrit, but still using the same script.

One also sees the mantra on these kinds of bells written in the Lantsa script (below).

My compliments to the bright spark who spotted that there were seven symbols!

Offering Mantra

Gino recently asked about the offering mantra used during the maṇḍala offering practice. I thought other people might be interested in this as well.

The mantra reads:

idaṃ guru-ratna-maṇḍalakaṃ niryātayāmi
इदं गुरुरत्नमण्डलकं निर्यातयामि
(above in dbu-can)

If we take this to be a Sanskrit sentence then the words guru and ratna are undeclined suggesting that they are part of a compound: gururatnamaṇḍalakaṃ. So how should be parse this compound? Firstly the individual words: guru = teacher; ratna = jewel; maṇḍalaka is a variant of maṇḍala. The -ṃ ending would appear to match the idaṃ and be an accusative making idaṃ gururatnamaṇḍalakaṃ the object of the verb. I suggest that we take ratnamaṇḍalaka to be a tatpuruṣa - maṇḍala of jewels. Then it would make some sense for this to make a tatpuruṣa with 'guru', but perhaps of the dative kind, 'to or for the guru' rather than the standard genitive 'of the guru'. Looking at the context I think this fits what is being done in practice.

The verb comes from the root √yat 'to stretch'. What we have here is a causative form: yātayati which can mean 'to suffer', or in this case 'to yield up' or 'surrender'. The first person singular is yātayāmi 'I surrender'. The addition of the prefix nir- here indicates that one is giving up to others. Of Monier-Williams' suggestions 'to give back, to restore' seem to fit the context, he notes the sense of 'to give as a present' in the Lalitavistara Sūtra.

So we could render the phrase

idaṃ guru-ratna-maṇḍalakaṃ niryātayāmi
I offer up this jewel-maṇḍala to the guru

New Mantra

Caught up with Tashi Mannox on a recent visit to London which was cool. He gave me a calligraphy of a mantra I hadn't come across before. It is used in the conclusion of Tibetan sadhanas.

oṃ supratiṣṭhavajraye svāhā

So after doing some research and consulting him about the Tibetan writing and pronunciation I've added the first new page to visiblemantra.org for some time. I'm calling it the supratiṣṭha mantra for want of a better name. The page has Siddhaṃ, Uchen and Devanāgarī.

Video - Avalokiteśvara Mantra in Siddhaṃ

I'm starting to muck about with making vids of Siddhaṃ calligraphy. Lo fi, but you can see how it works which is the point.

Mystery Mantra

A couple of days ago I noticed a mystery mantra on Omniglot's Puzzles Page. I couldn't see well enough to read so wrote and asked Mitchell who'd posted it to send a better quality image. He sent me the image on the left and things became more clear.

The script is obviously Lantsa. I know some Lantsa and there are one or two Lantsa resources on the web (see the scripts page) but I'm not very confident in it yet.

The centre syllable is obviously oṃ. From 12 o'clock I read ba la bra le bo nde svā hā.

So the mantra is: oṃ bale brale bonde svāhā.

Now in this script as in other Indic scripts the ba and va look very similar and so we could read oṃ vale vrale vonde svāhā. They are similar enough to suggest that they are all ba or all va. Otherwise I'm fairly confident of the reading. However this is not a mantra I am familiar with, nor can I find it in any of my usual sources. If you know this mantra please let me know.

Update: 18-9-08 and 3-11-08

Thanks to Fuxi who wrote in to suggest that this mantra may be related to Zhunti. If you look at Mediation Expert you can see the same diagram on a page of the sadhana instruction. In Sanskrit the name is Cundī, meaning "pure" and she is a feminine form of Avalokiteśvara, or perhaps a form of Uṣas or Mārīcī. In the Mahācundi Dhāraṇī there is a mantra: namo saptanam samyaksambuddha kotinam tadyatha: om, cale, cule, cundi svaha. The mantra above could be a form of this.

If you look at the image on the left, which is a close-up of a Cundi image, you can see some Sinified Lantsa script.

Across the top in larger letters is: oṃ āḥ hūṃ

Around the outer circle of the image reads: namo saptanam samyaksambuddha kotinam tadyatha. It starts just to the right of 12 o'clock.

The centre of the circle matches the image originally sent to Omniglot by Mitchell, with oṃ at the very centre. Ca is distinguished by a point on the loop - so with some hindsight we can see that the character could be ca. On the 3rd character what I took to be an 'r' ligature could be a 'u' diacritic though this usually is more curved and doesn't terminate on the stem. So the mantra above should be read:

oṃ cale cule cunde svāhā.

Redecorating

I finally got bored with all the green on Visible Mantra and have opted for basic black in the new colour scheme, with red drop capitals. The latter are inspired by the red seals Nathaniel Archer uses in his calligraphy. I keep thinking I must have a go at making some...

I'm also slightly rejigging the menu (which is time consuming because I use stone age technology to create VM) and have renamed a couple of the pages to better reflect what they are about. There is a new section of reading material. I have been working on some background material for the site which I think will fill a gap for anyone who is interested in Buddhist mantra.

Four Great Kings

I have added a page for the Four Great Kings after finding some mantras for them in the reference book Bonji Taikan. Because I don't read Japanese I can't say what the source of these mantras is, but it won't be the Mahāvairocana Sūtra where the mantras do not begin with oṃ, but with namaḥ samanta buddhānaṃ.

I have been interested in the Kings -Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Virūḍhaka, Virūpākṣa, and Vaiśravaṇa - since my ordination retreat when we carried out rituals involving them. The kings are not originally Buddhist and still show signs of their origins in Indian folk religion, as well as influences from Brahminism. However they must has been widely popular even at the time of the Buddha because they make frequent appearances in the Pāli Canon. They are devas from the lowest devaloka, and are therefore the closest to the human realm. As kings they are lords over the various chthonic spirits such as yakṣas, nāgas, kumbhāṇḍas, and gandharvas that inhabit the Buddhist mythic landscape.

I hope to do more thorough research on the kings in the future. The fact that there are mantras to these, and other Vedic/Hindu gods (such as Agni, Indra, and Śiva) is a very interesting facet of esoteric Buddhism.

Meditating on Arapacana

I've added a page which pulls together some of the information on the Arapacana as a meditation practice, particularly the relevant passages from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra in Conze's translation. These give a general idea of how the verses might have been used as a meditation, and I have used them to reconstruct a meditation on śunyata - links on the page.

Vajrasattva Mantra Audio

A few people now have asked me if I'll do some audio for Visible Mantra. So I've started with the most popular mantra on the site : the hundred syllable Vajrasattva Mantra. My Sanskrit pronunciation is not perfect by any means, but you get the idea. I've also done it chanted FWBO style, although this is not as straight-forward as it might be because there is now more than one version. This is my preferred version with (an attempt at) accurate Sanskrit pronunciation, correcting the mispronunciations that have crept into due to transmission. This is one good thing about preserving the tradition in writing - even if pronunciation shifts one can still here how it sounded at the time when it was written down. This is still not guarantee of perfection due to what the scholars call "scribal error" but it is helpful especially when the mantra gets transmitted through non Indo-European speaking cultures such as Japan and Tibet.

Anyway have a listen and see what you think. Feel free to comment. Any requests?

Mystery Mantra

This photo is one of several taken by Dharmacari Abhayanaga on pilgrimage in Sikkhim, and which I've used on the Avalokiteśvara page. It has a mantra I haven't been able to identify. It's the one in the middle and reads, as far as I can make out:

oṃ ā ma ra ṇi dzi wa na te ye swa ha

Can anyone help me with this?

13/12. It's all right. I've figured it out. It is the Amitāyus mantra.

Updates

I've made some more additions to the site.

I've added a shop which beefs up my Amazon Associate relationship. In the last 12 months links to Amazon have generated the enormous sum of £9 (with a payout threshold of £25). Hopefully the new shop will boost that a little. There are some Japanese Siddham books I'd like to get which are rather expensive!

I've added Siddham calligraphy of the Refuge formula - the three refuges.

Also some Lantsa bijas.

ARAPACANA

Over on my blog Jayarava Rave I've published a short article about the mantra of Manjusri and why syllables are considered to have a magical power. In such a short space it is difficult to do more than introduce a few ideas, but hopefully it will spark something off if you have an interest in that mantra.