The British missionary Geoffrey T. Bull, who was captured in Tibet by Chinese troops in 1950, described mani stones in his memoir, When Iron Gates Yield: “These are stones on which are carved the mystic Buddhist formula ‘Om mani padme Om.’ To us it is meaningless, but it is revered above all other speech by the Tibetans. The traditional interpretation is ‘O the jewel is in the heart of the lotus,’ but one lama told me that there are some exponents of Lamaistic teaching, who can discourse for three months on the supposed content of the saying alone.”44 In his popular work of 1951, Buddhism, Christmas Humphreys explains that the outer meaning of the mantra is “merely ‘Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus,’ and its inward meaning is the meaning of the Universe.”45 As we saw in chapter three, T. Lobsang Rampa explained in his 1956 The Third Eye that “The prayer of Lamaism is ‘Om mani pad-me Hum!’ which literally means ‘Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus!’ although initiates know that its true meaning is ‘Hail to Man’s Overself!”’ In 1959 Allen Edwardes published “a historical survey of the sexual practices of the East” called The Jewel in the Lotus. Devoted largely to the practices and perversions of Hindus and Muslims, it carries on the first page “Ome! munnee pudmeh hum. O hail! the Jewel in the Lotus.” It contains a brief description of a secret rite of the devotees of Kali:
In Benares, in May of 1857 the secret rites of the Shukteh-Poojah, propitiating the lingam-yoni and supplicating strength to destroy the East India Company incited the people to hysterical fervor. The ancient observance of nurmeydha (human sacrifice) was revived. . . .
Vibrant, doleful chanting; and then, the tide ebbs. A lone wail echoes: “Ome! munnee pudmeh hum—Ome! munnee pudmeh hum—Ome! munnee pudmeh hum—!”46
Lama Govinda himself devoted an entire work to the meaning of the mantra, his 1960 Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism according to the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Mantra Oṁ Maṇi Padme Hūṁ, which despite its title is based on no Tibetan text. His chief sources are the Upanishads, Swami Vivekananda, Arthur Avalon, Alexandra David-Neel, and, especially, the tetralogy of Evans-Wentz. For Govinda, the mantra was too profound to be merely translated; he devoted entire chapters to oṃ, maṇi, padme, and hūṃ, aligning them with the first four “Dhyāni Buddhas” (a term coined by Brian Hodgson that does not appear in Buddhist texts). But there are five such buddhas, and hence Govinda aligned the fifth, Amoghasiddhi, with what the mantra means when the four words come together:
[I]f OṀ represents the Way of Universality, MAṆI the way of Unity and Equality of all beings, PADMA the Way of Unfolding Vision, and HŪṀ the Way of Integration—then it must be said, that behind all of them stands the act of realization, the mysterious spiritual power (Skt., siddhi), which not only encourages us to proceed on the chosen way, but which transforms us while proceeding, until we ourselves have become the aim of our striving.47
Lama Govinda’s extravagant commentary may have inspired others to flights of exegesis, for in the 1960s and 1970s we find more and more elaborate discussions of the mantra. In the May 1963 article “Mountaintop War in Remote Ladakh,” W. E. Garrett, in the generally staid National Geographic, provides the following gloss: “OM—I invoke the path and experience of universality so that MANI—the jeweline luminosity of my immortal mind PADME—be unfolded within the depths of the lotus-center of awakened consciousness HUM—and I be wafted by the ecstasy of breaking through all bonds and horizons.”48 The missionary and anthropologist Robert Ekvall, who spent many years prior to the Second World War in the Amdo region of Tibet, made the mantra both vocative and locative, explaining that “It may safely be said that there is no Tibetan—excluding the completely witless and speechless—who does not personally participate in this enunciation and not one who is completely certain just what the phrase means. The traditional explanation is that it is a vocative . . . hailing the jewel in the lotus and thus referring to the incarnation of the Buddhahood.”49 A long list of meanings of the mantra is found in the 1965 account of the American Air Corps crew whose plane crashed in Tibet on November 30, 1943. There the author agnostically provides a dozen translations of the mantra, concluding, “The meaning of Om mani padme hum is as different as the individual minds of Tibet’s millions.”50 Despite devoting all of Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism to the mantra, Lama Govinda weighed in again in his 1966 The Way of the White Clouds, where he offered a gloss that he seems to suggest was provided by the Geluk lama, Tomo Geshe Rinpoche. He writes:
The moment, however, we become conscious of him [the Buddha] as the light in our innermost being, the Mantra OṀ MAṆI PADME HŪṀ begins to reveal its meaning, because now the ‘lotus’ (padma) is our own heart, in which the ‘jewel’ (maṇi), namely the Buddha, is present. The OṀ and the HŪṀ, however, represent the universe in its highest and deepest aspects, in all its forms of appearance and experience, which we should embrace with unlimited love and compassion like the Buddha.51
In 1970 the noted student of Chinese religions John Blofeld provided this lengthy neo-Vedantin commentary in his The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet:
In common with all mantras, the Mani has Om as its first syllable. Om stands for the totality of sound and, indeed, for the totality of existence. Originally written Aum, it starts at the back of the throat and ends with the lips. It is chief among the sounds to which a mystical creative quality is attached. Translators who have rendered it as ‘O,’ ‘Oh,’ or ‘Hail’ have obviously misconceived its meaning and its function. The A stands for consciousness of the external world; the U, for consciousness of what goes on inside our minds; and the M, for consciousness of the non-dual, unqualified emptiness of the void.
The next syllable is Mani, meaning the Jewel. It is equated with Vajra, the adamantine non-substance which is perfectly void and yet more impervious to harm or change than the hardest substance known to chemistry. Mani is the symbol of highest value within our mind, the pure void which is always to be found there when the intervening layers of murky consciousness are pierced.
Padma (of which Padme is the vocative form) literally means the Lotus. It is the symbol of spiritual unfoldment whereby the Mani is finally reached.
Hum, like Om, is untranslatable. Om is the infinite and Hum is the infinite within the finite and therefore stands for our potential Enlightenment, the perception of the void within the non-void, Mind in the form of mind, the unconditioned in the conditioned, the transcendental in the ephemeral, the subtle embodied in the dense. This above all other mantric syllables symbolizes the central truth of the Vajrayana—the truth of voidness enclosed within the petals of the non-void.
Om and Hum, however, are much more than symbols. Properly used, they have the power to awake in the human consciousness an intuitive understanding of truths impossible to clothe in words. Mani Padme, the Jewel and Lotus which form the body of the mantra, have, even at the surface level, a number of complementary meanings. For example, the Lotus stands for the Dharma and the Jewel for the liberating truth it enfolds; or the Lotus is the world of form and the Jewel, the formless world, the reality infusing form, and so on.52
In the 1970s, as in the late nineteenth century, the mantra again lost its moorings in Tibet and floated free to be seized upon by the devotees of other spiritual paths. Thus Grace Cooke, founder of the White Eagle Lodge, in her 1973 book on creative meditation called The Jewel in the Lotus, wrote, “This Christ Spirit is the shining jewel we see in the heart of the lily, the jewel within the lotus, the jewel within our own heart.”53 In 1974 the British Theosophist Douglas Baker published the first volume of his seven-volume The Seven Pillars of Ancient Wisdom: The Synthesis of Yoga, Esoteric Science and Psychology. Titled The Jewel in the Lotus, it was devoted to an exposition of the theory of hylozoism, the proposition that the organic and inorganic are filled with life. The work contained no mention of Tibet or of oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ, explaining instead that after the third initiation, “The three chakras in the head region now begin to merge at right angles to each other . . . to form a single gynaeciu
m at the centre of which are to be found the Higher Triad of permanent atoms, the Jewel in the Lotus.”54 A 1983 volume entitled The Jewel in the Lotus consists of a collection of 648 quotations from various Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist texts and from artists, writers, and philosophers such as Blavatsky, Balzac, Blake, Buber, Dante, Dickinson, Gibran, Mozart, Plotinus, Rilke, Spinoza, and Tagore. In the foreword, the editor explains:
The Jewel in the Lotus is offered for regular use by ardent theophilanthropists, now and in the future. A key is suggested for such users. The entire collection of invocations, chants and intimations is dedicated to the unknown but undaunted pathfinders to the global civilization of tomorrow, the noble sowers of seeds in the numinous dawn of the Aquarian Age.55
In 1993, Donald Walters (Kriyananda), the founder and spiritual director of the Ananda World-Brotherhood Village, published The Jewel in the Lotus, a one-act play about his guru, Yogananda, in which neither Buddhism nor Tibet is mentioned. It contains the line “And we, while living in the shadow of this very peak, might never have known that on Lotus Mountain lives the jewel of our desires.”56 The Baha’i faith has produced a videotape about their religion called The Jewel in the Lotus.
The Tibetan diaspora of 1959 renewed interest among anthropologists in the Tibetan-speaking populations of Nepal and their religions. In 1981 the anthropologist Robert Paul, working among the Sherpas, claimed that although his subjects did not know that the mantra means that the jewel is in the lotus, they did know “from the inflection that the mani is in the pema.” He noted that the sound mm is an attempt to reproduce the phonation produced while sucking, particularly at the mother’s breast. Thus both oṃ and hūṃ (he seemed unaware that Tibetans pronounce the syllable as “hoong”) gain their power because they evoke the experience of nursing. He also noted that the letter m (maṇi) is associated with the mother, and the letter p (padma) with the father. This would appear to present problems, since when the mantra is rendered as “the jewel in the lotus,” the word that begins with m is associated with the male organ while the word that begins with p is associated with the female. His solution is to see in the mantra an evocation of the infant son at his mother’s breast: the female maṇi is in the male padma. “The mother is still seen as the bisexual phallic mother of the Pre-Oedipal phase; and the thought expressed is not ‘the phallus is in the vulva’ but rather its earlier equivalent, ‘the nipple is in the mouth.’”57
In Rodger Kamenetz’s 1994 account of his encounter with Buddhism, The Jew in the Lotus, one finds the mantra in the glossary with the following explanation. “A Sanskrit mantra. According to the Dalai Lama, ‘this is almost our national mantra.’ The meaning is, ‘The Jewel in the Lotus.’ Jewel = thought of enlightenment, Lotus = mind.” (Presumably, the latter part of the explanation was not provided by the Dalai Lama.) In the spectacular exhibition catalogue Wisdom and Compassion, co-authored with Marilyn Rhie, Robert Thurman wrote, “The Tibetan landscape is filled with mani stones, flat rocks with the mantra of compassion, OM MANI PADME HUM (‘OM! the jewel in the lotus [itself a symbol of the union of compassion and wisdom, male and female, and so on] HUM’).”58 More recently, in his Essential Tibetan Buddhism, Thurman wrote of Tibet, “it was the land of his sacred mantra, OM MANI PADME HUM! ‘Come! Jewel in the Lotus! In my heart!’”59 And in 1996, Wolfgang von Effra explained in his Uncompromising Tibet, “Pious Tibetans daily move hundreds of thousands of prayer mills, murmuring this mantra. ‘Oh jewel in the mystery of the lotus flower’ is the popular translation. Another translation better reflects the true meaning: ‘Blessed be your speech, body and soul by the jewel of the lotus flower.’”60
Today, a mail order catalog called The Mystic Trader (a division of Pacific Spirit Corporation in Oregon) offers crystals, pyramids, batik T-shirts, boomerangs, Balinese masks, bamboo blow guns, and Burmese gongs. One can also find advertised prayer wheels, mani stones, and even prayer wheel earrings, each inscribed with the mantra, which the catalog explains is a prayer for peace and good fortune that means “I bow down to the Jewel in the Lotus Blossom.” Another catalog, dZi: The Tibet Collection, sells “Tibetan-made Clothing, Folk Arts, Good Karma and More!” and advertises maṇi stones. Here we are told that the mantra means “‘hail to the jewel in the lotus,’ generally considered a mantra or prayer for compassion and understanding in the world.” On the World Wide Web, perhaps fulfilling Monier-Williams’s worst fears about the use of technology for prayer, there is a site named “Click Here for Good Karma,” which can convert the spinning hard drive of one’s computer into a prayer wheel. By clicking on the appropriate icon, oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ (which, we are told here, means “the jewel in the lotus of the heart”) is copied onto one’s hard drive.61
It is perhaps noteworthy that in all of these renderings of the mantra as some variation of “the jewel in the lotus,” Tibetan texts are never cited in support, that once the early-nineteenth-century European Sanskrit scholars had translated it as “the jewel in the lotus,” the rendering took on a life of its own. There are numerous Tibetan works on the mantra, but they are rarely concerned with the semantic meaning of the Sanskrit words, perhaps confirming André Padoux’s assertion that “a mantra has a use rather than a meaning.”62 Instead, in a tradition that can be traced back to the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sutra, the Tibetan concern is generally with establishing a wide range of homologies between the six syllables of the mantra (in Tibetan the mantra is commonly referred to as yi ge drug ma, “the six syllables”) and other sets of six in Buddhist doctrine. The most common of these homologies is that between the six syllables and the six realms of rebirth (gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, hell beings), in which the recitation of each syllable is said to protect one from the sufferings of the corresponding realm.63 (In his Peaks and Lamas, Marco Pallis notes, “One of the less profound interpretations current among the lamas is to establish a correlation between each of the six syllables and one of the six classes of beings in the Round.”)64 A typical Tibetan work on the mantra is The Benefits of the Maṇi Wheel (Maṇi ’khor lo’i phan yon), which contains passages such as the following:
The benefit of turning the [prayer] wheel once is equal to reading the translation of the [Indian] treatises (bstan ’gyur) once. Turning it twice is equal to reading the words of the Conqueror [the Buddha] once. Turning it three times purifies the obstructions of body, speech, and mind. Turning it ten times purifies sins equal to Mount Meru. Turning it one hundred times makes one equal to the king of dharma Yama [the Lord of Death]. Turning it one thousand times, one understands the meaning of the dharmakāya for one’s own welfare. Turning it ten thousand times, one brings about the welfare of oneself and other sentient beings. Turning it one hundred thousand times, one is reborn in the retinue of Avalokiteśvara. Turning it ten million times, the sentient beings of the six realms attain the ocean of bliss.65
Nowhere in the work is the “meaning” of the mantra explained. In recent years, when its meaning has been explained by a Tibetan, it is often for the benefit of an Anglophone audience. The Dalai Lama has identified maṇi with compassion and padme with wisdom; hūṃ symbolizes the union of these two. “Thus the six syllables, oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ, mean that in dependence on a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha.”66
This is not to suggest that discussions of the meaning of the mantra are entirely absent in Tibetan literature, as several scholars have recently shown. In a 1987 article on the prayer wheel, Dan Martin refers to a seventeenth-century work by the prime minister of the fifth Dalai Lama, Desi Sangye Gyatso (Sde srid sangs rgyas rgya mtsho), in which translations of a number of Sanskrit mantras are provided. Here, oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ is rendered as “O, you who have the jewel [and] the lotus” (Kye nor bu padma can).67 Pieter Verhagen has discovered an early Tibetan grammatical treatise, possibly from the ninth century, that offers the mantra as an example of the
vocative case. The text reads, in part, “Because oṃ is the nature of the five wisdoms, it is stated first. It closes with hūṃ, ‘take to mind.’ Regarding the actual vocative in between, maṇi is jewel. Padme is the same [in Sanskrit and Tibetan] and is left [untranslated]. Then, ‘jewel-lotus’ is invoked in obeisance. The adding of e in me [of padme] means ‘O’; as in ‘O jewel lotus.’”68
Thus the correct interpretation of the mantra would seem to be that it is not two words, maṇi padme, with the latter in the locative, but rather, as Tibetans appear to have known for some time, a vocative, with maṇipadmā the name of a deity, the Jewel-Lotus One. As David Snellgrove wrote in 1957, “This seems to be the solution of the problem, and there is no justification for splitting the compound into such a phrase as ‘jewel in the lotus,’ for which a meaning can as always easily be found.”69
But scholars remain unsure of the significance of the grammatical suggestion that the deity be female, despite the fact that in Tibet Avalokiteśvara is male, and they remain in doubt as to the relation between the jewel and the lotus. Verhagen offers as possible translations “(woman) who has the lotus of the jewel,” “(woman) who has the lotus with the jewel,” “(woman) who has the lotus in the jewel,” and “(woman) who has the lotus that is a jewel.”70 Some decades earlier, in a 1925 article in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Asiatic Society, Sten Konow noted that the most important of the sutras associated with Avalokiteśvara, the Kāraṇḍavyūha, describes a mandala in which the six-syllable knowledge (ṣaḍakṣarī vidyā) appears as a goddess, white in color, with four arms, holding a red lotus in her left hand and a rosary in her right. Thus, he argues, the compound maṇipadmā is in the feminine because the mantra (or its “wisdom,” vidyā) is embodied as a goddess, the śakti (he uses the Śaiva term that is not used in Buddhist tantra) of Avalokiteśvara.71 He convincingly shows (as Thomas had before him) that maṇipadmā is a bahuvrīhi compound in the vocative case, meaning “O Jewel-Lotus.” What remained to be determined was the relation between the jewel and the lotus. It is perhaps inevitable that Konow concludes:
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