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The meaning of mantra: a return to our cosmic origin. When we speak of mantra, we are not speaking of words in the original sense. A mantra is not a petition, nor a wish, nor a chant to fortify the ego. At the point in time in the persons practice, one should have, if not realized, understood that the ego is getting in the way. A mantra is a vibration, older than any language, a sound that pre-exists before the ”I” ever appeared. In Sanskrit, mantra is often translated as “that which protects the mind.” But even this is only a doorway. How then does a mantra protects the mind? By emptying it - by dissolving the constructs, the ego as mentioned above, that make us feel separate from the living cosmos. The sound invites us back to the primordial AUM, the original resonance from which all forms arise. When we enter a mantra fully, something very subtle and beautiful happens: we are no longer the one reciting it. There is just the mantra reciting itself. The sound, the breath, the consciousness, the cosmos, all one, in an expensive field of total awareness. Every mantra carries a seed vibration, a bija, I like to call it a key, that echoes the structure of the universe. It is the same vibration that lives in the stars, the rivers, the mycelium under your feet, and in the center of your chest, inside your heart. A mantra doesn’t point to the divine- it IS- the divine, vibrating in syllables and sounds. They are the revelations perceived by ancient awaken beings whose minds were so clear as to hear the deep meaning of existence itself through the practice of meditation, laced in and of infinite wisdom. From master to disciple, breath to breath, mantra to mantra, The vibration has been carried like a pure flame that never dies. Nothing is added, nothing is owned, It is simply kept alive. When the mantra is given, it is never given to a person. It is offered to the part of us that remembers: The Buddha Nature, the Clear Light, the unconditioned consciousness. This is why mantras heal. Not because they change what we are, but because they remind us who we are. With unconditional love, ~ Ven. Bao Co
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