Experiences in Japa and Mantra-Meditation

I cannot even begin to count the time I've committed to meditation over the years. Timewise, the bulk of my experiences span from my twelve active years as a Gaudiya Vaishnava, employing the tradition's methodology, the focus of which was the unveiling of a connection with god Krishna, his companions and his spiritual domain. In the last two years, I have also experimented with a number of other similar methods of meditation, which along with the Gaudiya approach form the bulk of this article.

A holy man seated for meditation with his rosary.

In the Gaudiya tradition, mantras are twofold: One category is the public maha-mantra (Hare Krishna Hare Krishna etc.), the other the many secret initiation mantras one receives from a guru. While the latter are almost invariably vocalized in the mind only, the former is also murmured, chanted audibly, and also sung to the accompaniment of instruments as a hymn of prayer and praise.

A japa-mala in its covering bag, underneath the maha-mantra written in Bengali script.

Symbolism of the Rosary

The japa-mala, a sacred rosary made of Tulasi-wood with 108 beads, is employed for the counting of mantras. The rosary is taken by many Gaudiya Vaishnavas to symbolize the rasa-mandala, the circular midnight dance arena of Krishna and the 108 main gopis. The rosary frequently has a string tied in after the eight largest beads, signifying the eight principal gopis.

I cannot recall anyone ever featuring the symbolism in any practical capacity, and so it remains a mystery whether you're supposed to meditate on the eight gopis every time you touch the eight beads, and whether you're supposed to mentally contemplate on the Rasa-dance pastime over and over again, or whether it's just a fancy poetic depiction without much further meaning. The only practical gopi-mandala related practice is a prayer some chant before taking up the rosary:

tri-bhaGga-bhaGgima-rUpaM veNu-randhra-karAJcitam |

gopI-maNDala-madhyasthaM zobhitaM nanda-nandanam || MBD 4.223

“In a three-fold bending form, his fingers curled on the holes of the flute, amidst a circle of gopis is the beautiful son of Nanda.”

While such symbolism can serve as useful initial inspiration, in this case I found no overall practicability to this, whether as an emotional or a visual aid. As for the string, I did find it useful in keeping mental track of even and odd rounds. As I sit for meditation, I'm disinclined from fiddling with the counter beads and breaking my solid posture and energy build-up every few minutes. Crossing the string with your fingers helps you bundle rounds into segments of two, and thence into segments of four and eight, up to where you can chant dozens of rounds and keep accurate mental track of the number without its causing a disturbance.

Author chanting japa in 2007 at Radhakund.

Experiences with Gaudiya Vaishnava Mantras

Rarely do I engage in japa these days, as I've come to find both the accessories and the verbal mantra-formulations distracting in general. Even with the maha-mantra, when I took up chanting en masse during my later days at Radhakund, it became constantly less and less a matter of the individual names in the mantra. Is one seriously supposed to do a focused back-and-forth bouncing contemplation on Radha and Krishna? If the point is to focus on them, it helps solidify your meditation if a single object remains in extended focus.

I personally found the diksha-mantras much more suited to this purpose, the Radha-mantra in particular. It consists of two bijas, the name of Radha in dative, and a closing exhortation. Dhyanachandra lists a common variant of the mantra as zrIM rAM rAdhikAyai svAhA in his manual. Combined with asanas and pranayama, the prolonged vibration of this formula led me to a substantial kundalini-experience — even if the presence and action of kundalini is largely ignored in Gaudiya circles.

The eighteen-syllable Krishna-mantra (astadasaksara-mantra or Gopala-mantra: klIM kRSNAya govindAya gopIjana-vallabhAya svAhA), on the other hand, was a bit lengthy to my liking and less useful for focused contemplation. Again, is one supposed to focus on Krishna, Govinda or Gopijanavallabha? If they are the one and the same, where is there a need for a plurality of names? And if they are different (as any pundit would explain to you), we again have the problem of having to constantly shift our focus.

I remember also growing uneasy over some of the other mantras, the tripartite gayatris in particular, that did not follow the standard meter and rhythm; a symmetric rhythm helps with maintaining focus. In particular, the accessory gayatris for the remaining members of the Panca-tattva and the accessory gayatris for the gopis were rather cumbersome formulations. (I was initiated into a total of 12 mantras and 12 gayatris at Radhakund.)

During my active chanting years, especially with the numeric strength of japa growing to two daily lakhs (128 rounds) and beyond, it was necessary to learn to relate to the ping-pong of names in the maha-mantra. Less a conscious decision and more a natural evolution, the explicit components of the mantra began to withdraw in favor of exposing a spiritual fabric rising from the vibration itself, a vibration underlying the names. It was this presence, of which it seemed a great deal could arise, that I associated with suddha-sattva, the existential fabric of the spiritual world itself. I doubt the idea would pass any orthodoxies, but such was my experience nevertheless.

Replica of Tryambakeshvar Mahadeva, one of the twelve Jyotirlingas located around India.

Experiences with Traditional Hindu Mantras

I have also done a fair amount of japa during my post-Gaudiya time, starting in the summer of 2007 with a brief and final Gaudiya revisit during the Kartika month of the same year. In exploring a future direction, I hopped on a rollercoaster of Advaitic and Buddhist studies, for those were the two traditions I found to be best matching my general spiritual orientation, matching inclinations present from before my contact with Vaishnavism, and latent throughout the years of Vaishnava practice.

In the initial period of exploration I grew quite fond of OM, the classic ultimate chant exhorted in the Upanishads. I found it much more suited for touching the tranquil existential fabric I had conjured with my earlier chantings of maha-mantra. In fact I even experimented for a week on hybrid mental japa of maha-mantra and OM — it's amazing what your mind can pull together once you put it to work. It was rather interesting, but required an excess of mental energy to contain over long term. I settled for the good old OM and was quite happy with it.

The pancaksara-mantra for Shiva (oM namaH zivAya) was a natural expansion of OM, very compact in its formula, carrying the gist of the structural power of the shorter Vaishnava-mantras I had once found useful. Moreover it carried strong Advaitic content, regardless of whether you associated it with the Upanishadic world or the approach of Kashmiri Shaivism, conveying a strong sense of non-dual divinity embodied as the Shiva-archetype. Along with the mantra of Tara, the pancaksara must be the most chanted among my post-Gaudiya mantras.

A statue of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Kathmandu.

Experiences with Buddhist Mantras

During my travels with the Buddhist monks and beyond, I committed a fair deal of time to some common Buddhist mantras. From the Thai monks I walked with, I learned the practice of chanting the ten ephitets of the Buddha on a rosary (iti 'pi so bhagavo arahaM samma-sambuddho...), which was more of a broad contemplation than a narrow-band mantra even if quite catchy with its irregular rhythm, and also briefly experimented with the shorter Theravadan chant (namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa).

A similar wisdom-contemplation was the great Mahayana mantra (oM gate gate para-gate para-saMgate bodhi svAhA) summarizing the heart of Madhyamika-philosophy on the nature of existence, covering the evolving perceptions of form and emptiness, and culminating into bodhi or enlightenment. While not as suited for extended repetition, I found chanting a few rounds to effect a rather refreshing flashback of the fundamentals of existence. Of course, with all mantras and particularly in this case, one must be well acquainted with the meaning of the mantra, and for fuller effect share personal experience of and insight into the said base aspects of reality.

Another genre of mantras employed in the Buddhist tradition are those associated with tantric or Tibetan Buddhism with its approach of contemplating on enlightened archetypal deities. My favorite by far was the mantra of goddess Tara (oM tAre tuttAre ture svAhA), which I practiced along with a refined visualization practice I learned from Atisha's medieval sadhana-manual in the library of the Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu. I also experimented on the mantra of Padmasambhava (oM aH hUM padma-guru vajra-siddhi hUM), a powerful chant in its own right, and the classic mantra of Avalokitesvara (oM maNi padme hUM), the bodhisattva of compassion, a mantra full of soothing lucidity and peace.

The mantra oM maNi padme hUM engraved on a stone wall in Tibetan script at Bodh Gaya.

Other Methods of Meditation

It was the non-verbal methods of meditation that I was most at home with. I suppose this largely owes to my preference of conceptual thinking over verbalization, or the pazyanti (direct perceptual) level over madhyama (mental verbalization) and vaikhari (external verbalization) stages in Upanishadic terms. Mental and verbal japa still maintain a sense of distance to the object, while conceptual contemplation puts one in an immediate relationship with the object. (This is incidentally also the goal of the Gaudiya way of meditation with its specific object.)

Two old Buddhist practices aiming for samadhi (concentration) and prajna (wisdom) are the heart of all Buddhist meditation. The former, while not directly conducive to the awakening of ultimate wisdom on its own, is a powerful and systematic method for attaining increasing levels of samadhi or jhana (Sanskrit: dhyana) along with their subsequent benefits. The sophisticated jhana-theory of Theravada Buddhism serves as a highly useful reference point for other traditions of object-meditation. Perhaps the most sriking discovery for me in this was in understanding the underlying principles and the inherent similarity between supposedly unique meditative traditions.

Vipassana or insight-meditation, the second of the two divisions of Buddhist meditation, is a direct tool for attaining ultimate wisdom and enlightenment. While vipassana may employ a number of techniques in attaining deep introspective perception and clarity, essentially it's about learning to observe the inherent natures of reality, witnessing the fundamental principles of reality (anicca: temporarity; dukkha: anxiety; anatta: non-selfhood) in all phenomena. While there are methods for enhancing the experience, the core observant principle does not require technical support.

All in all, it's all but clouds at the back of the hall...

Craving, Peace and Spiritual Objectives

I have come to marginalize goal-oriented spiritual practice in my life, having observed that it often leads to results quite antithetical to the desired goal, and instead of contributing to, consumes the sense of perennial tranquility and insight from the inside out. A very elementary Buddhist teaching is that craving leads to misery. Whether one is craving for openly mundane aims, supernatural powers, imaginary liberation or the favors of a supreme god, the very fact that there is craving leads to grief. As such, while I do not systematically seek to practice the said methods (or any other methods), their gist in revealing the natural potentials of the mind seem to have been amicably absorbed.

It is my personal conclusion that the less one attempts to actively manipulate one's spiritual evolution, the more one gains in the way of peace and existential insight. By stopping you progress. By seeking progress you stop. What a beautiful paradox. Now, I could cite any number of Hindu and Buddhist teachers whose teachings ultimately reflect the same, but I don't as I'm more concerned with direct personal experience than I am with the spiritual systematizations of another, no matter how wise he may have been.

Not that one isn't to learn of the experiences of others — but neither is one to assume he can successfully lead the life and grasp the insights of another without eventually developing his own. Whatever we learn is to be personally experimented on, experienced, and incorporated into our own unique frame of reference. We are what we are, and exactly at the place we are — independent of anyone's projections of what and where we ought to be according to his system. Walk your own way, I say. Or rather, stop and be happy.

Metric Soul and Divided Minds

The following text is drawn and expanded from my reply to a friend's query on the Upanishadic descriptions of the soul being the size of a ten-thousandth of the tip of the hair, and at the same time pervade the body; in general, the diverse depictions of the soul to be of a particular measure can come across as confusing. The second half of the post discusses the greater "divided spirit" issue of God and soul.

A Metric Soul

The soul, if we choose to believe in one that is, being an immaterial spirit-substance, cannot have a scale of comparison with matter. It is no more the size of a proton than it is the size of a hamburger or a Polish truck-driver. It is neither proportionate nor disproportionate to the object it appears to animate, for it has no proportion in common with inanimate matter.

Of course one might compare the soul to a lamp and the pervading of the body to its rays in a room, and that's a rather appropriate analogy as long as we forget about our attempts to pin it out on the metric scale. Both the lamp and the rays are finite objects, as are the individual jiva-soul and his field of awareness; hence the metaphor works in this application.

Technically speaking, the soul pervades and animates the body through the conscious mental functions (citta) filtered through the medium of ahankara conjointly with Antaryamin, the Inner Regulator or the so-called "super-soul". The antaryamin is variously identified as ishvara or atman itself in different schools of thought.

Atisayokti - Literary Exaggeration

Everything in the scriptures is a mixture of literal and metaphorical. There is svabhavokti (ukti or statement reflecting object's own nature) and there are the atisayokti (statement of exaggeration). All the four standard atisayoktis in the alankara-shastra (e.g. Alankara-kaustubha: 8.23), or the classical Indian theory of literary composition and criticism, feature departures from the literal meaning.

The third one, where the impossible is being stated, is the one we are primarily after at the moment, for the soul has no material scale; hence the statement of comparison is an impossibility. The two first atisayoktis are comparisons to other objects (and I suppose taking this as a hyperbolic diminutive would be every bit as valid), the other overt and the other covert, and the fourth features effect as simultaneous with or preceding the cause.

If we were to indeed indeed pursue this literally, as fundamentalists frequently do, we would have to first ask whether this proverbial hair is Afro-American, French or Vedic Indian — perhaps the sage in question split his own hair tip into 10,000 pieces and compared it to his soul, discovering it was an exact match under his microscope? Did he split it with a Vedic hair-splitter? Perhaps everyone's soul is 10,000 tip of their own hair? This again is problematic for men with thinning hair or baldness; their souls must be approaching limbo...

God and Souls - Divided Minds

A whole other subject is the supposed division occurring between the jiva-atman and the all-pervasive brahman or ultimate God. From where I look at things, Advaita-vedanta is quite right in insisting that the atman (which is equated in the realization-stage with the brahman although brahman and brahman alone was the atman was all along) cannot be factually divided into individual soul-units, and that the individuality in question is only a temporary illusion rooted in ajnana, or primal ignorance. This is of course solved with the acquisition of jnana, or knowledge proper.

Let us assume the presence of an individual "soul fragment", a separate conscious unit. Fragments by definition cannot have the same quality as an unbreakable whole, for they differ in the quality of being fragmentable. Again, if the great whole can be divided into fragments, a second is thereby posited next to the non-dual, leading to a number of questions on the unique nature of the supposed one and the greatest non-dual spirit proclaimed across the Upanishads.

The Gaudiya Solution

Gaudiya Vaishnavism proposes a symbiotic difference-cum-non-difference solution to the issue. Aristoteles would insist things either are or are not, for they cannot be both. A follower of Jiva Goswami's would then employ the acintya-shakti defence: You need to believe that God has the power to not make sense to make headway with the dilemma.

All too often, the inconceivability card is a handy answer to each and every equation that doesn't exactly add up; issue transcendent is beyond your logic and perceptions. (Which leaves me wondering whether, stretching entirely out of our objective human grasp, this God does not become irrelevant altogether.)

Now, of course there is the standard explanation with the shakti-vada and the nonduality between the energy (shakti) and the energetic (shaktiman), the former of which would include all of us and the inanimate world. Not the least of the problems is the fact that shakti-vada has nothing to do with Vedanta and everything to do with the tantric tradition.

That notwithstanding, the problem of evidently divided consciousness between us and God remains. I for one do not possess all the knowledge of god, indicating we are clearly separate units of consciousness; there is no practicality to the proposal of my being one with a personal, actively omniscient God.

Like Sun and Sunshine?

Omniscience indicates a flawless and all-pervading entity or state of being. This one, all-knowing and all-encompassing God is all that is. Shakti cannot be classified as a second separate unit, even as dependent and subordinate, for this would be introducing dualism, the existence of a second beside God; assuming the non-duality of God and creation, one would expect us souls to share of the same pristine strata of undivided and omniscient existence.

The simile of the sun and the sunshine should be understood for what it is: a simile. A simile does not constitute proof in and of itself, it is a manner of illustrating a more abstract principle. The problems we run into applying this to the case at hand are manifold.

The most obvious of all is that sun and sunshine do not feature a conscious property, whether unified or divided; both are mechanical, passive factors incapable of decision-making, unlike soul and god. Independent decision-making and limited or unlimited fields of awareness, in turn, are the very factors begging the question to begin with.

If a simile is employed in illustrating simultaneously one and different consciousness(es), and especially in the capacity of proof, it should be a comparison of equals.

A Monistic Angle

There is a very vivid and distinct duality here, indicating we need to either admit to the non-reality of duality and divided consciousness, labeling them as a mere illusion (and moreover an illusion occuring in brahman with no existence to its occurence), or do away with an undivided and omniscient, yet eeriely antropomorphic God.

Advaita-siddhanta considers Isvara (personal god) to be the most you can see of the nondual absolute through the veil of maya; as ajnana or individual ignorance is dispelled, the ignorance concerning duality is dispelled, and the one atman alone remains aglow. The doctrine of atman then becomes a de-facto doctrine of anatman, for there was no everlasting individual soul to begin with.

Neither duality nor nonduality are entirely satisfactory for a philosophical answer. I don't have an exact answer for the way all stuff works, though I do have some cool ideas I need to explore a bit further. The citta-matram doctrine of the Yogacara-school of Buddhism, the theory of an unified mind-field and repository consciousness or alaya-vijnana, comes across as rather fascinating to me, and also correlates with some of my experiences.

Summa Summarum

My preferred approach to the question, independent of any scriptures, is to conceive of a single mental field in which both the Ishvara and the jivas are fluctuation in greater or smaller degrees. The only factual omniscient potential is in the universal mind-field, an uninvolved, egoless all-containing entirety, where no catalyst (ahankara) for individuality exists; hence seeing without a seer is actualized. The concept appears to make seamless sense to me, independent of conformance to any ancient or contemporary theories.

In the end, fiddling with lofty philosophical formulations amounts to little more than an entertaining mind-game fulfilling our intellectual urges. Otherwise, assumptions of mastery of a theory may help one to comfort himself and bring order into the surrounding chaos, or to command and conquer existence through comprehension. Nirvana and God remain lurking in the fabric of the harmony, peace, clarity and joy of an independent nature we discover within ourselves through personal experience, introspection and natural immersion, and even if we all have the philosophy a wee bit different, it really doesn't matter a damn thing in the end.