Om mani padme hum
六字大明咒 · Six syllables · the mantra of Guanyin
This is the best known mantra in Buddhism, recited across Tibet, Mongolia, China and far beyond. It belongs to Avalokiteshvara — Guanyin in Chinese, Chenrezig in Tibetan — the bodhisattva of compassion. It is carved into roadside stones, rolled inside prayer wheels, and counted on beads one syllable-string at a time.
What it means
The honest answer is that scholars disagree. The familiar rendering “the jewel in the lotus” reads maṇi (jewel) and padme (lotus) as a compound, but the grammar does not quite support it: padme is a vocative, so the phrase is more likely addressing someone called Jewel-Lotus — an epithet of the bodhisattva.
Oṃ and hūṃ are not words at all. They are sounds that open and close the mantra, and translating them is beside the point.
In practice almost nobody recites it for its dictionary meaning. A traditional teaching assigns each syllable to one of the six realms of existence and to a state of mind it answers: oṃ to pride, ma to jealousy, ṇi to craving, pad to ignorance, me to greed, hūṃ to anger. Recited slowly, it is a way of turning attention toward compassion rather than a sentence to be parsed.
How it is recited
It is usually repeated on a mala of 108 beads, one recitation per bead, moving the thread with the thumb and stopping rather than crossing the larger guru bead — at the end of a round you reverse direction instead.
Speed does not matter and neither does volume; many people recite it under the breath or silently. In the hall you can turn the beads and count a round of 108.
The six syllables
- 唵oṃ
- 嘛ma
- 呢ṇi
- 叭pad
- 咪me
- 吽hūṃ
Mandarin: ǎn má ní bā mī hōng. Tibetan pronunciation is closer to “om mani peme hung”.