Abirlal Gangopadhyay
Doctoral Research Fellow, ICSSR
PhD Research Scholar
Department of Sanskrit Studies
University of Hyderabad
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What you have found is what I have found: the Buddhist texts simply use oṃ without explaining it. It is used at the beginning of most Buddhist mantras, as may be seen in texts such as the Sādhanamālā, besides in individual tantras. Its importance and use does not seem to have been questioned, but rather was taken for granted.
As you well know, the great source-work on the syllable oṃ or auṃ is the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, correlating its four elements, a, u, m, and the following silence, with the states of waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the fourth. These four states were adopted and used extensively in the Buddhist Kālacakra-tantra. They are there correlated with the four buddha-bodies (nirmāṇa-kāya, sambhoga-kāya, dharma-kāya, sahaja-kāya), and with the four drops, bindu, located in the body at four major cakras (head, throat, heart, navel), which are used in the Kālacakra sādhana practice (see chapter 4, verses 107-108, and chapter 5, verses 125-126, 156, for specific references to the four states).
Some scholars, both western and eastern, have opined that the Kālacakra-tantra brought in Hindu ideas such as this in order to convert Hindus. I personally prefer to refrain from attributing motive. Unless a writer says why he has done something, we cannot really know. The idea of the four states does not appear to me to be something that was brought in and tacked on, but rather to be an integral and fundamental part of the Kālacakra system. It seems simpler to think that such ideas were used because the writer thought that they were true.
Mantras also occasionally occur in non-tantric Buddhism, of course having oṃ as the first syllable. The story of the origin of the famous mantra oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ is given in the Avalokiteśvara-guṇa-kāraṇḍa-vyūha-sūtra, or in short, Kāraṇḍa-vyūha. This text does not, however, say anything about the significance of oṃ. Among the massive Prajñā-pāramitā sūtras, the very short Prajñā-pāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra, well known as the Heart Sūtra, has an important and often chanted mantra. It, too, does not say anything about the significance of oṃ. Eight Indian commentaries on the Heart Sūtra were translated into Tibetan, and from Tibetan translated into English by Donald S. Lopez, Jr., in his 1996 book, Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. In these eight commentaries I noticed only this one statement pertaining to the significance of oṃ (p. 201): “Oṃ and svāhā are terms of blessing for the purpose of achieving the effect of the repetition.” Not much.
In
the absence of material in Buddhism on the significance of oṃ, it may be worth
mentioning what may be the most extensive text on the subject: the Praṇava-vāda of Gārgyāyaṇa. This
hitherto unknown text was dictated from memory by a blind pandit named Dhanarāj
at the end of the 1800s. A summarized English translation of it by Bhagavan Das
was published in three volumes, 1910-1913. It seems that one or more old Sanskrit
manuscripts of it became available to a few people, and two volumes of the
Sanskrit text were published in 1915 and 1919. The concluding third volume
never appeared. The manuscript of the Sanskrit text as taken down from
dictation, accompanied by Bhagavan Das’ handwritten summarized translation, is
preserved at the Adyar Library. For anyone who thinks that this text is
worthwhile, a good project would be to prepare and publish the third volume of
the Sanskrit text. All the published volumes have been posted by me here: http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/sanskrit-texts-3/suddha-dharma-mandala-texts/.
Best regards,
David Reigle
Colorado, U.S.A.
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Sant Rajinder Singh Ji Maharaj Chair Professor, IIT-Madras.
Senior Fellow, ICSSR, New Delhi.
Academic Director, Swadeshi Indology.
Member, Academic Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthana.
Nominated Member, IIAS, Shimla.
Former Professor, CAHC, Jain University, Bangalore.Former Director, Karnataka Samskrit
University, Bangalore.
Former Head, Dept. of Sanskrit, The
National Colleges, Bangalore.
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