Just do a quick search on the internet to realize that the practice of reciting a “mantra” has become a kind of medicine for something. A kind of magic formula for acquiring something. It is easy to find mantras for the most diverse things such as “mantra to find your love”, “mantra to attract money”, “mantra to open the way”, “mantra to cure difficult diseases”. There are mantras for a multitude of other curious things.

To deepen our knowledge, we need to better understand the origin of mantras. In the West, the word mantra began to be used in a generic way to define any and every sentence or word that aims to acquire something. This is not wrong, but when you go around India, most traditionalist Indians are keen to make it clear that a phrase or a word, to be called a mantra, must necessarily have been extracted from the Rig Veda, the first and largest of the 4 books that make up The Vedas, the oldest literary work of the Indo-Aryan language.

Experts such as the German linguist Max Müller (1823-1900), who devoted his life to the study of the translations of these Indian classics, indicate that “The Vedas” was completed before 600 BC.

Rig means “verse”, and Rig Veda is, for the most part, a collection of hymns of praise and prayers to a variety of Indian deities. So, a mantra for wealth and prosperity can be an excerpt within Rig Veda extracted from one of the prayers of worship to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, who in many of her images has a pitcher pouring gold coins in one of her four hands. That is, a mantra, in its origin, is exclusively a prayer of worship to an Indian deity.

In India, for the sake of distinction, phrases that have not been extracted from the Rig Veda are often called bhajan.

A bhajan is also a kind of devotional prayer to deities in the form of rhythmic verses. More simply, a bhajan is nothing more than a mantra that was created by man, as it is believed that the verses of the Rig Veda were conceived in a divine way.

After clarifying all these aspects, today, as a kind of universal convention, a mantra is an instrument, a prayer, which aims to connect us with a deity.

We may then suggest that the Lord’s Prayer is a mantra for connecting with Jesus, that the Hail Mary Prayer is a mantra for connecting with the Virgin Mary. Just as the mantra “Om mani padme hum” is also a kind of prayer to connect with Avalokiteshvara, a deity from Tibetan Buddhism.

The role of a mantra should not be limited to the idea of acquiring some goal. A mantra should not be chanted to a deity with whom we did not have sincere communion either.

A mantra, indeed, is an invitation for the qualities of a deity to which we connect to manifest upon our consciousness.

A mantra is a bond of love.

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash