It seems that Andrade could not find a lama who could tell him the meaning of the mantra, so he provided his own, telling a monk, “As you patter these words like parrots which do not understand what they say, know that Om ma’ny patmeonry signifies ‘Lord, forgive me my sins.’ And from that hour all the monks assigned this meaning to the mysterious words.”9
Shortly thereafter, Europeans learned that the prayer was directed to a particular deity. In his China Illustrata of 1667, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher describes the religion of the Tanguts in the city of Lhasa (in the English translation of 1669):
[I]t hath a King of its own, and is altogether intangled with the foul Erreurs of Heathenism, it worshippeth Idols with the difference of Deities; amongst which, that which they call Menipe, hath the preheminence, and with its ninefold difference of Heads, riseth or terminateth in a Cone of monstrous height. . . . Before this Demon or false God this foolish people performeth their Sacred Rites with many unwonted Gesticulations and Dances, often repeating of these words: O Manipe Mi Hum, 0 Manipe Mi Hum, that is, O Manipe, save us; and these sottish people are wont to set many sorts of viands and meats before the idol for the propitiating or appeasing of the Deity, and perform such abominations of idolatry.10
But Desideri, who unlike Father Kircher actually went to Tibet and learned the Tibetan language, disputed the rendering of the mantra as “O god Manipe, save us.” He provided the mantra’s first European translation:
The interpretation given by the Thibettans of the real words is as follows: the word Om is not a definitive term, but an ornamental one. The second word, Manì, means a jewel, such as a pearl, diamond or any other precious stone. The third word Pemè is the name of a flower which grows in a pond or a lake, and in Hindustani is called Camel pul. The letter E, like our O, is a vocative particle. The last word Hum is not a definite term, but is also purely ornamental, and is used by magicians. To understand the meaning of these words, which have no syntactic construction, I must refer you to what I have already said about a Thibettan idol called Cen-ree-zij, represented as a youth holding a jewel in his right hand and seated on a flower called Pêmà in Thibettan. These words are, therefore, only an invocation to Cen-ree-zij, the idol and principal advocate of the Thibettans. It runs thus: “O thou who holdest a jewel in Thy right hand, and art seated on the flower Pêmà.” They believe that these words were taught to their ancestors by Cen-ree-zij himself as a prayer pleasing to him, and which would deliver them from the long and grievous travail of transmigration.11
Desideri’s rendering remained unknown until the manuscript of his Relazione was discovered in Italy in 1875 and published in 1904. Thus Thomas Astley clearly relied on Kircher when, in his 1747 New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, he described the god Menippe: “This is the chief of all the Images, before which the People perform their sacred Rites, with many odd Gesticulations and Dances, often repeating, O Manipe Mi-hum, O Manipe Mi-hum!, that is, O Manipe, save us!”12 The German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, reporting on the religion of the Kalmyks in 1769, wrote:
Great and holy Lamas, who have been zealous in their office and obtained a victory over all their passions, pass, when they die, by the aid of their prayers only, (of which the words, om ma wie pad, me chum have the greatest influence), immediately into heaven, to the abode of the burchans [buddhas], where they enjoy perfect rest with godly souls, and exercise themselves to divine service, till the time of their regeneration comes.13
From this point on, it seemed that no traveler to Tibet or Ladakh could let the mantra pass without comment. In a letter of August 25, 1830, written at “the frontier between Ladakh and Chinese Tartary,” the French explorer Victor Jacquemont reported, “How strange it all seemed to me in Tibet, where they also sing a great deal (for there are one or two inhabitants to the square league) but never any song but one, having three words: Oum mani padmei; which means, in the learned language, which none of the villagers or their lamas understand: ‘O, diamond lotus!’—and takes the singers straight into the paradise of Buddha.”14 In an 1836 article in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, Brian H. Hodgson, British resident at the Court of Nepal, explains in a footnote: “[Padma-páni] is figured as a graceful youth, erect, and bearing in either hand a lotos and a jewel. The last circumstance explains the meaning of the celebrated Shadaksharí Mantra, or six-lettered invocation of him, viz., Om! Mani padme hom! of which so many corrupt versions and more corrupt interpretations have appeared from Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, Mongolian, and other sources.”15
With the rise of the science of philology in the nineteenth century, the responsibility for the meaning of the mantra was transferred from missionaries, travelers, and colonial officers to professional scholars of Sanskrit, who put forth another interpretation. In an 1831 article entitled “Explication et origine de la formule Bouddhique OM MAṆI PADMÈ HOÛM,” Heinrich Julius von Klaproth explains that padmè is the locative of padma (lotus), such that the mantra means “Oh! The jewel is in the lotus, Amen” (Oh! Le joyau (est) dans le lotus, Amen). He goes on to observe that “Despite this indubitable meaning, the Buddhists of Tibet and of Mongolia are seeking a mystical meaning in each of the six syllables that compose this phrase. There are entire books filled with fanciful explanations.”16 Later in the same article he explains that the meaning of the mantra derives from a legend in which Avalokiteśvara is born from a lotus; all other explanations are futile because “they are nothing but mystical and are in no way based on the meaning of the Sanskrit words that compose the mantra.” He notes that if the mantra were to be found in India, it would be among the followers of Śiva, where it would mean “Oh! The lingam is in the yoni, Amen.”17 W. Schott in his 1844 “Über den Buddhaismus in Hochasien und in China” concurs that the mantra means “O the jewel in the lotus” (O Edelstein in der Padma-Blume).18 He notes that in the Roman Catholic tome Alphabetum Tibetanum (to be discussed below) the statement that padma is in the vocative rather than the locative was apparently made by someone who was ignorant of Sanskrit.19 Köppen concludes in his 1859 Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche that “Properly and literally, the four words, the single utterance of which is supposed to bring incalculable blessings, mean no more than ‘O! The gem in the lotus! Amen!’”20 Scholarly opinion seemed unanimous by 1863, when, in his Buddhism in Tibet Illustrated by Literary Documents and Objects of Religious Worship with an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding It in India, Emil Schlagintweit wrote of the mantra, “Its real meaning, however, was long involved in doubt, and it is only by the most recent researches that a positive determination has been finally arrived at.” That meaning is “O, the Jewel in the Lotus: Amen.”21
From this point on, fixed by the authority of academic science, the jewel remained firmly in the lotus, and the scholar’s rendering began to appear in more popular works. In their account Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China: 1844–1846, the Vincentian missionaries Huc and Gabet report that the mantra means “O the gem in the lotus, Amen,” which they say can be paraphrased as “Oh, may I obtain perfection, and be absorbed in Buddha, Amen.”22 There were occasional voices of dissent, however. The Reverend Joseph Wolff, “missionary to the Jews and Muhammadans in Persia, Bokhara, Cashmeer, etc.,” explains that “Mani” and “Peme” are the names of the prophets of the Buddhists of Tibet, seeing in the mantra evidence of Manichaeism.23 In his 1863 Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Tibet, Captain William Henry Knight of the 48th Regiment was repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to determine what the mantra meant, going so far as to surreptitiously empty a prayer wheel of its contents while visiting the monastery at Hemis in Ladakh. His frustration drove him to devote an entire appendix to the meaning and, especially, the correct pronunciation of the mantra, neither of which the Tibetans seemed to know. (He had been told by a fat lama that it meant the “Supreme Being.”)
The Lamas themselves, no doubt, believe that the doctrine contained in these marvellous words is immense, and the higher dignitar
ies of the Church may know their derivation; but, to the great majority, even the mystic meaning and dim legendary history which the true pronunciation and rightful origin of the words would bring to their minds, are unknown, and they are thus deprived of that large amount of comfort and consolation which they would otherwise derive from the glowing and all-powerful sentence—“Oh, the jewel in the lotus, Amen!”24
In 1877 Madame Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled, “Aum (mystic Sanskrit term of the Trinity), mani (holy jewel), padme (in the lotus, padma being the name for lotus), hum (be it so). The six syllables in the sentence correspond to the six chief powers of nature emanating from Buddha (the abstract deity, not Gautama), who is the seventh, the Alpha and Omega of being.”25 After the death of Tennyson, Edwin Arnold, the author of the 1879 poetic rendering of the life of the Buddha The Light of Asia, was nominated by Queen Victoria to be the next poet laureate. The nomination was opposed by then prime minister Gladstone in favor of Alfred Austin, and Arnold was knighted instead. Sir Edwin’s poem, which contains no mention of Tibet, actually ends with the mantra:
The Dew is on the Lotus!—Rise, Great Sun!
And lift my leaf and mix me with the wave.
Om mani padme hum, the Sunrise comes!
The Dewdrop slips into the shining Sea!26
The Moravian missionary to Tibet H. A. Jäschke provided an extended discussion of the mantra in his 1882 A Tibetan-English Dictionary, as part of the entry for oṃ. He glossed the mantra as “O thou jewel in the lotus, hūm!” and referred the reader to Köppen before explaining:
The Tibetans themselves are ignorant of the proper sense of these six syllables, if sense at all there be in them, and it is not unlikely that some shrewd priest invented this form of prayer, in order to furnish the common people with a formula or symbol, easily to be retained by the memory, and the frequent recital of which might satisfy their religious wants. And though there may be no obvious meaning in such exclamations or prayers, yet their efficacy is sure to be firmly believed in by a people, whose practical religion chiefly consists in the performances of certain rites and ceremonies, in a devout veneration of their Lamas, combined with frequent oblations to them. . . . The numerous attempts that have been made to explain Ommanipadmehūm satisfactorily, and to discover a deeper sense or even a hidden wisdom in it, have proved more or less unsuccessful. The most simple and popular, but also the flattest of these explanations is derived from the purely extrinsic circumstance, that the Sanskrit words of the prayer consist of six syllables, and accordingly it is suggested, that each of the syllables, when pronounced by a pious Buddhist, conveys a blessing upon one of the “six classes of beings.”27
He concluded by observing that Köppen’s conjecture (which, perhaps due to his Christian sensibility, he does not specify) that the mantra derives from Śaivism and has a sexual meaning (“Blessed be the lingaṃ in the yoni! Amen!”) “is nothing but a smart thought of that learned author.”
By the late nineteenth century the mantra and its meaning began to take on a life of its own; it was alluded to by writers who not only had never traveled to Tibet, but (unlike Madame Blavatsky) never even claimed to have done so. Thus in 1883 Mary Agnes Tincker published the novel The Jewel in the Lotos. Set in Italy, it contains no reference to Buddhism or Tibet. At the end the hero has a vision of the renewal of Christianity, freed from the shackles of Rome: “The mystic lotos-flower that symbolizes time afloat upon eternity had stirred before him, and he had caught a glimpse of golden peace hidden within the folded centuries.”28
In his 1887 Swedenborg the Buddhist: The Higher Swedenborgianism, Its Secrets and Thibetan Origin, Philangi Dasa glossed the mantra as “Mystic Trinity! Holy Jewel in the Lotus! Amen!” going on to explain that the “six breath-sounds answer to the Six powers of Nature outflowing from the Seventh. The whole may be paraphrased, The One Life is in the pith of the heart.”29
At the same time, the presence of the jewel in the lotus was being reconfirmed by scholars of India and of Tibet. In his 1888 Duff Lectures, “Buddhism, Its Connexion with Brahmanism and Its Contrast with Christianity,” Sir Monier-Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, translated the mantra as “Om! the Jewel in the Lotus! Hūm!” He wrote that “In all probability an occult meaning underlies the ‘Jewel-lotus’ formula and my own belief is that the majority of those who repeat it are ignorantly doing homage to the self-generative power supposed to inhere in the universe,” explaining in a note that “the name Mani is applied to the male organ, and the female is compared to a Lotus-blossom in the Kāma-Śāstras. I fully believe the formula to have a phallic meaning, because Tibetan Buddhism is undoubtedly connected with Śaivism.”30 Citing this passage in his 1896 The Buddhist Praying-Wheel, William Simpson observed, “Some notion may now be formed why this celebrated six-syllabled sentence is so mystical, and is, at the same time, believed to be so potent.”31
In his 1895 The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism, Waddell wrote, “Thus, the commonest mystic formula in Lāmaism, the ‘Om-ma-ṇi-pad-me Hūṃ,’—which literally means, ‘Om! The Jewel in the Lotus! Hūm!’—is addressed to the Bodhisat Padmapāṇi who is represented like Buddha as seated or standing within a lotus-flower.”32 In his later account of the Younghusband expedition, he rendered the mantra as “Hail! The Jewel [Grand Lama] in the lotus-flower!” and as “Hail! Jewel [Lord of Mercy] in the Lotus-Flower!”33 Apparently unaware of Waddell, the Australian missionary J. Huston Edgar, who served in the China Inland Mission on the border of Tibet beginning in 1901, explained that the mantra is “without meaning in Tibetan” and is “addressed to no known man, demon, beast, or god.”34 William Carey’s 1901 Adventures in Tibet, published by the United Society of Christian Endeavor, dissented mildly:
If you ask what it means, no one can tell you, but every one has a most astonishing faith in the efficacy of writing, reading, rotating, and repeating it on every possible occasion and an endless number of times. A literal translation is, O Jewel in the Lotus! O! But to whom the invocation is addressed and why the mere words should be invested with such extraordinary sanctity and merit-producing power, must remain a mystery. If they think upon the subject at all, probably the Tibetans of to-day consider that they are addressing Avalokita, who is always represented as sitting on a lotus, and his incarnation, the Dalai Lama, whose Tibetan name is Gyal-wa Rin-po-ch’e, “Great Gem of Majesty.”35
In S. E. Brady’s 1905 short story, “The Jewel in the Lotus,” a lama who craved extinction but could not eradicate his love of living learned this lesson: “Turning the prayer-wheel quickly, his starved heart whispered, ‘I understand O Perfect One! The jewel in the Lotus! It is love—I understand.’”36
After decades of variations on “the jewel in the lotus” in travel literature and fiction, scholars weighed in on the matter again after the turn of the century, but this time with little effect. In 1906, in a note in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, F. W. Thomas wrote, “I see no reason whatever for departing from the view of Hodgson . . . that Maṇipadme is one word. . . . [W]ould it not be more probable that maṇipadme is a vocative referring to a feminine counterpart of that Bodhisattva, i.e. Tārā?”37 In 1915 the Moravian missionary A. H. Francke published an article in which he explained that maṇipadme should be read as a compound, “jewel-lotus,” in the vocative (O Jewel-Lotus) rather than the locative (jewel in the lotus) case:
It has mostly been explained as meaning “Oh, thou jewel in the lotus!”; and, to arrive at this explanation, it was considered necessary to look at the word padme as the locative case of a noun padma, “lotus.” Dr. F. W. Thomas, of the India Office, was the first to recognize that the termination e is not that of the locative case of the masculine declension of nouns ending in a, but the vocative case of a feminine noun ending in ā. The connexion of this formula with the two other ones shows us that maṇipadme is the vocative case of the name of the female deity Maṇipadmā, the “deity of the jewel-lotus,” apparently the Śakti of Maṇipadma, who mus
t be identical with Padmapāṇi or Avalokiteśvara.38
But by this time, the jewel was inextricable from the lotus, so much so that those who had spent long periods in Tibet (including a Tibetan) glossed the mantra as such. Thus a Tibetan Christian, Paul Sherap, explains in G. A. Combe’s 1926 A Tibetan on Tibet that the mantra means “Oh, the Jewel in the Lotus.”39 David Macdonald, who spent fifteen years in Tibet as a British trade agent, explained that the mantra means “Hail! The Jewel in the Lotus!” in his 1929 memoir The Land of the Lama: A Description of a Country of Contrasts & of Its Cheerful, Happy-Go-Lucky People of Hardy Nature & Curious Customs: Their Religion, Ways of Living, Trade & Social Life.40 Sir Basil Gould, who served in the British foreign service in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet from 1935 to 1945 entitled his memoir The Jewel in the Lotus, explaining, “The title is a translation of the two central words in the mystic Buddhist formula Om Mani Padme Hum. I have chosen it because wherever I served, within or beyond the borders of India and of Pakistan, religion was a large part of the way of life of the peoples with whom I had to deal, and nowhere did I feel more at home than amongst those whose constant thought was of the Jewel in the Lotus.”41
The French explorer André Guibaut, who traveled in eastern Tibet in 1940, speculated that the meaning of the mantra “has been lost in the mist of ages,” and that it is perhaps best understood as a remnant of an atavistic world: “It is doubtless an evocation to the unseen world, the territory of the unknown, uncanny faces. Where, better than here, on these high tablelands towering to the skies, can one recapture the terrors of the early ages of mankind.”42 But the mountaineer Marco Pallis in his 1949 Peaks and Lamas was inspired to philosophize on the mantra:
Mani means “jewel”; therefore a precious thing, the Doctrine. Padme means “in the lotus”; it may refer to the world which enshrines the doctrine of the Buddha (the jewel), or to the spirit in whose depths he who knows how to take soundings will discover Knowledge, Reality, and Liberation, these three being really one and the same thing under different names. Or possibly the lotus, the usual throne of divinities and saints, is simply attached as a divine attribute to the gem of the doctrine.43
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