Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra

tadyathā

My Jayarava's Rave blog post today is about tadyathā especially in relation to the Heart Sutra mantra.

http://jayarava.blogspot.com/2009/10/tadyatha-in-heart-sutra.html

The Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra

My latest post on Jayarava's Raves is some notes on a translation of the 100 Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra. I also offer some commentary on the words, though I plan to write a longer piece on this. I've also replaced the translation on the Visible Mantra Vajrasattva page.

I worked on this for my book project (still lumbering on) but couldn't wait to share it. The version of the mantra I'm commenting on is the one in the FWBO Puja Book.

On the 12th of Dec I'm running a workshop at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre where we will study the Sanskrit text and then chant the mantra. Book online by visiting the CBC Website.

Happy Halloween - the Vajrasattva mantra is just what you need to keep the ghouls and ghosts away!

oṃ vajrasattvasamayamanupālaya vajrasattvatvenopatiṣṭha dṛḍho me bhava sutoṣyo me bhava supoṣyo me bhava anurakto me bhava sarva siddhiṃ me prayaccha sarvakarmasu ca me cittaṃ śreyaḥ kuru hūṃ ha ha ha ha hoḥ bhagavan sarvatathāgatavajra mā me muñca vajrī bhava mahāsamayasattva āḥ

White Tārā

I've recently updated the notes on the White Tārā mantra in accordance with a new understanding of Sanskrit. Not all ambiguities are able to be resolved, but at least it is now clear what is ambiguous and in what way. I've changed the way I present the variations on the mantra. My previous efforts were too dependent on books, and have again benefited from my Sanskrit studies.

Much remains to be done in this vein, although it is important to recall that mantras are not entirely translatable and that this kind of approach is limited. The White Tārā mantra is somewhat unusual in containing grammatical sensible phrases.

Seed Syllable: Stryi

Sanskrit
Originally uploaded by Woesinger

This seed-syllable often seen carved onto stūpas in Japan is associated with the Karaṇḍamudrā or Casket Seal dhāraṇī. This texts begins:

namastryadhvikānāṁ sarva tathāgatānāṁ
homage to all the Tathāgatas of the three times.

Broken down into syllables for writing this becomes:

na ma strya dhvi kā nāṁ

For more information see the stryi bīja page on visiblemantra.org

Answers to Deshpande's Saṃskritasubohinī exercises

I might have mentioned that I'm finally learning Sanskrit. As I go through the exercises in the text book Saṃskṛtasubodhinī: A Sanskrit Primer by Madhav Desphande, I am typing up my answers to the exercises. This is work in progress - probably full of errors, but hopefully will become a useful resource in time.

If you have the time and energy to proof read, and/or make suggestions on these pages then please get in touch. Even better would be if you wanted to contribute your own answers to bits I've left out, or not got to yet!

Downloads

I have finally got around to creating a downloads page. At present the only menu link is on the index page. On the downloads page you will find fonts I use; keyboard maps for Windows that I've created and regularly use for Roman with Unicode diacritics and देवनागरि; and a desk top interface for the digital Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary which is very handy. As far as I know I'm free to give this stuff away, but let me know if you think there are copyright problems.

I'm interested to get feedback on whether the keyboards work and on what systems. So if you try them, please drop me a line to let me know how you get on.

The keyboards are especially cool because they allow you to type characters in whatever application you want (notepad even which is what I use to write Visible Mantra) and this is good because it allows more accurate searching of Google for instance compare these three searches: appamāda vs appamada vs अप्पमाद. I have a Tibetan keyboard for writing Sanskrit as well which is a bit more complex - hope to document it soon and upload it.

BTW if you use Firefox you can specify different fonts for Roman and Devanāgarī - my current set up is Times Ext Roman for Western and Arial Unicode MS for Devanāgarī. There are lots of Devanāgarī Unicode fonts around now.