What is a Mantra?

What is a Mantra? How it comes about or gets formulated? Who creates Mantra? Where can we find the Mantras? Is it that only some specific sounds can be used as Mantra or any sound or any word can be used as Mantra? How does it work and under what condition? Who can use a Mantra? We need to know the answers to all these questions before go deep into the understanding of the power of a Mantra.

A Mantra, as Sri Aurobindo's puts it, “is a word of power and light that comes from the overmind inspiration or from a very high plane of intuition.” (The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, P. 369) A Mantra is thus an inspired and intuitive and rhythmic utterance, a revealed seeing. It comes out of the “realisation of some inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed.” (The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, P. 199) In another significant passage Sri Aurobindo says that the Mantra “is a direct and most heightened rhythmic Word which embodies an intuitive and revelatory inspiration and ensouls the mind with the sight and the presence of the very self, the inmost reality of things and with its truth and with the divine soul-forms of it, the godheads which are born from the living Truth. Or, let us say, it is a supreme rhythmic language which seizes, holds upon all that is finite and brings into each the light and voice of its own infinite.” (The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, P. 200)

So we understand that Mantra is created by the one who comes into direct contact with a deeper truth of life or spirit. Therefore the one to whom a Mantra is revealed is known as a Rishi. A Rishi is not the composer of a Mantra but a seer (drashta) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. He has the inner sight to see the Mantra. Therefore the Rishi sings yadrigeva dadrishe tadrgucyate, ‘I speak the way I have seen’ (Rigveda, 5.44.6). He is also known as the hearer of the Truth (satyashruta). He possesses a supernatural faculty of hearing. To his inner audience the divine word comes vibrating out of the Infinite. To him the Mantra comes as a spontaneous and inspired expression of an inner experience of the light, power and rhythm of a truth. So according to Sri Aurobindo, Mantra “is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and thrown out silently or vocally – the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the spoken – precisely for the work of creation.” (Sri Aurobindo, SABCL., Vol.12, pp.169-70)