Mantra

A mantra is a string of syllables, usually in Sanskrit, recited in Vajrayana Buddhism as a practice of speech. Often it holds the name and essence of an enlightened deity in a handful of sounds. The word is traditionally explained as "that which protects the mind": manas means mind, tra protection. The Tibetan word is ngak.

Not a magic formula

The first time you hear a room full of Tibetan Buddhists reciting, it can sound like a steady murmur. One line, over and over, hundreds of times. It's easy to take it for a spell. That isn't how it works.

What a mantra protects the mind from is its own chatter: the planning, the worrying, the running commentary that never quite stops. A single sound connected with awakening takes its place. Yet it goes further than swapping one distraction for a better one. Tantra treats everything you experience as pure: forms as the body of the deity, sounds as mantra, thoughts as the play of wisdom. Seen that way, the mantra is the deity, appearing as sound. When you recite it you aren't calling on someone outside yourself. You're remembering what you already are.

So how you recite matters. Not rushed, not on autopilot, but with some attention to what it means, and usually with a visualisation. Many mantras in the Tibetan tradition keep the way Tibetans pronounced Sanskrit: pema rather than padma, hung rather than hum. That isn't carelessness. It's how they were handed down from teacher to student, and that transmission, the reading transmission or lung, is what gives a mantra its power.

Mantra in the Nyingma tradition

Mantra is so central that the Vajrayana is also known as the Mantrayana, the vehicle of mantra. The Nyingma school's full name for itself is Sangngak Nyingma, the Secret Mantra of the Early Translations. And a ngakpa, the lay yogi of this tradition, is literally a mantra person.

Once you start practising, you meet it everywhere. In the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro you recite Vajrasattva's hundred-syllable mantra for purification, and in the guru yoga the Vajra Guru mantra of Guru Rinpoche: om ah hung vajra guru pema siddhi hung. Practitioners keep count on a mala, a string of 108 beads, and in the Ngöndro accumulations the numbers run into the hundreds of thousands. Counting is a support, not the point. It keeps you going on the days you'd rather not.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling we recite the mantras of the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro together every Saturday in Hoofddorp. You learn to pronounce them the way the lineage passed them on, and once you've heard them in a group a few times, finding your own rhythm at home gets a lot easier.