The word mantra shares an ancient root with thinking, dating back about 4,000 years
A mantra can be a single syllable like Om or a long sacred phrase, and some carry no literal meaning at all. The word comes from an Indo-European root meaning to think plus a suffix for a tool, so a mantra is, quite literally, an instrument of the mind.
Mantras are sacred sounds, syllables, words or phrases, most often in Sanskrit, Avestan or a related tongue, believed to hold spiritual or magical power. Om is a seed-syllable mantra, a bija, which Hindus regard as the first sound and the sonic essence of ultimate reality. Longer examples include the Gayatri Mantra and Om Namah Shivaya, and they may express a deity's name or a yearning for truth, light, peace or immortality.
The oldest mentions are in India's Vedas and Iran's Avesta. Sanskrit mantra and Avestan manthra both descend from a shared Proto-Indo-Iranian form, which suggests the practice goes back to the common Indo-Iranian period of around 2000 BCE. Use in India probably began before 1000 BC, and Frits Staal argues that by the middle Vedic centuries mantras had become a fusion of art and science. In Chinese the word became zhenyan, true words, read in Japanese as shingon, which also names a Buddhist school.
Practice varies across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Sikhism. A widespread method is japa, repeating a mantra meditatively while counting on a string of prayer beads called a mala. Tantric traditions, sometimes called mantra paths, treat these sounds as the most powerful route to liberation and often require initiation into a particular mantra and its deity before reciting it, though some mantras are open to anyone.
Scholars have never agreed on a definition. One camp regards mantras as largely meaningless sound patterns, another as meaningful linguistic tools. Both accept that they are melodic and built with mathematical precision, and that their effect resembles the pull of beloved wordless music. In everyday English the word has drifted further, meaning any phrase repeated often, such as a slogan a football team adopts.
Source: Mantra
