Mantra, Chanting and the Power of Sound

Mantra meditation gives the mind a sound to stay with. The sound can be one syllable, a word or a short verse. You can say it out loud, murmur it, or let it sound only in your thoughts, and you can repeat it for a whole sitting or sound it once. That is the practice as Britannica’s entry on mantra describes it across Hinduism and Buddhism. And you don’t need to know what a mantra means before you begin. Some of the oldest ones are built from syllables that have no dictionary meaning at all, and in those the sound carries the weight.

For many westerners chanting mantras is just too much. What does that OM mean, how could it help me in any way, one might ask.

Fortunately the first time I came in contact with chanting there were no special sounds or phrases to repeat. I learned more about the sound, posture and observing my body as the sound vibrates and flows in and out of my body.

Soon I was hooked. 15 minutes of slowly breathing out a sound, which felt natural to me at that moment, gave me a feeling of great relaxation, ease and inner joy.

I feel that in the east, where repeating mantras is something passed down through generations, there is a natural understanding of the mechanics of the process. When someone from the west gets thrown into it, a few words about what it is and how to work with sound can greatly demystify the process, make it more approachable and easier to apply in practice.

Start with a sound, before any words

The first practice has no phrase to learn. It works with posture, breath and whatever sound comes out of you today. Fifteen minutes is a good length to grow into, and you can begin with less.

1. Sit on a chair or a cushion so your back stays upright without strain. Let the hands rest on the thighs and the jaw go soft.
2. Breathe in through the nose at its own pace. On the out-breath, let a sound leave you slowly: an open “ah”, a long “oo”, or a hum with the lips closed. Pick the one that feels natural now. Tomorrow it may be a different one.
3. Let the sound last as long as the breath does. When the air runs out, stop, and wait for the next in-breath to arrive by itself.
4. Notice where the sound lives in the body. A hum tends to buzz in the lips and behind the nose, while an “ah” sits lower, in the chest. Rest a palm on your breastbone and you can feel the vibration under your hand.
5. When your attention drifts into planning or remembering, come back with the next out-breath. There is nothing to correct.
6. After the last sound, stay a minute in the quiet and notice how the body feels now compared with when you sat down.

If using your voice feels awkward at first, the closed-lip hum is the quietest of these sounds. It is also the end of the syllable om, which is where the next practice begins.

Repeating a traditional mantra

Traditional practice adds two things to the bare sound: a fixed phrase and, usually, a count. Repeating a mantra in meditation is called japa, and it is often done with a mala, a string of prayer beads. Japa belongs mostly to Hinduism, though Buddhist, Jain and Sikh practitioners use it too. In Hindu practice a mantra is often recited 108 times, a number with numerological weight in that tradition, while a short recitation can be only three.

108 times

A simple way to try it:

1. Choose a short phrase. If you practise within a tradition or with a teacher, use what they give you, since some mantras are handed over at initiation. If not, the single syllable om opens most Hindu mantras and is the shortest place to start.
2. Hold a mala, or count on your fingers. One bead, one repetition. Feel each bead slide under the thumb as you move to the next.
3. Choose how to voice it. The traditions use all three ways: aloud, muttered under the breath, or silent in the mind. Aloud, the chest fills with it; muttered, mostly the lips move; silent, only the shape of the word remains. Spend a round on each and notice the difference for yourself.
4. When you lose count, carry on from where you think you were.
5. At the end of the round, sound the mantra once more and sit for a few breaths of silence.

What the word means, and whether you need to know

The word itself is a small lesson. Britannica traces it to the Sanskrit root man, “to think”, plus the suffix -tra, which marks a tool. Put together, a mantra is an instrument of thought. In Hindu use, sounding a deity’s mantra is one way of bringing that deity to mind.

root man, to thinksuffix tra, a tool

instrument of thought

Whether a mantra has to mean anything is an old argument, and it isn’t settled. The Vedic scholar Frits Staal, in Rules Without Meaning (1989), called Vedic mantras essentially meaningless recitations that accompany ritual. Laurie Patton answered in Bringing the Gods to Mind (2005) that the words, the ritual act and the effect being sought come together into meaning by association. For a beginner the useful part is that people who spent careers on this question still disagree.

The tradition itself makes room for sound without meaning. Many Hindu mantras contain seed syllables, bija, such as gaṃ, hrīṃ and śrīṃ. They carry no semantic meaning; they are held to be the deity in sonic form.

Om sits at the centre of all this. In the Brahmanas and the Upanishads it becomes the supreme mantra, described as the essence of the Vedas and as absolute reality, brahman. The Taittiriya Upanishad (1.8) puts it in five words: “This whole world is oṃ.” The written sign ॐ joins three sounds, a, u and a nasal m. Say it slowly and you can hear all of them: the mouth opens, rounds, then closes into the hum you met in the first practice. So the question of what OM means has several answers, and none of them has to come before the first breath.

Mantras you are likely to meet

• Om namah shivaya. “Obeisance to Shiva.” The word namaḥ means bowing and shares its root with namaste, a greeting that bows to the person in front of you.
• The Gayatri mantra. A hymn to the Sun from the Rigveda (3.62.10), spoken into the ear of initiates at upanayana, the sacred thread ceremony. Later Hinduism came to picture it as a goddess.
• Om mani padme hum. The most popular Tibetan Buddhist mantra, an invocation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.
• The Heart Sutra mantra. It closes the Heart Sutra, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation opens “Gone, gone, gone beyond.” Its last word, svāhā, is the one spoken in Vedic ritual as offerings were poured into the fire.
• Namo Amituofo, Namu Amida Butsu. The Chinese and Japanese forms of the Pure Land practice of reciting the name of Amitabha Buddha, which devotees believe ensures rebirth in his paradise, Sukhavati. It is recited without end, also on electronic recordings, and encouraged for people nearing the end of life.
• Namu myōhō renge kyō. The Nichiren Buddhist mantra, which honours a text, the Lotus Sutra, rather than a deity.

Where the practice comes from

Sanskrit mantras first took shape in Vedic religion, the earliest layer of Hinduism, around 1500 to 1200 BCE. The roots run wider than India. The oldest Iranian scriptures, the Gathas of the Avesta, share whole poetic phrases with the Rigveda; “with heart and mind” appears in both, a sign of a common spiritual culture before the two peoples went separate ways (Encyclopaedia Iranica).

Buddhism and Jainism grew up in India between the 7th and 4th centuries BCE and took over Sanskrit mantras for worship and reverence. As Hinduism turned toward devotion to Vishnu, Shiva and the goddesses, new mantras were written for them, and meditating on those mantras became part of everyday practice. In Tibet mantra became so central that the Vajrayana tradition behind Tibetan Buddhism is sometimes called Mantrayana, “path of mantras”, with mantras passed from teacher to student along lineages.

In the east, then, the practice arrives with generations of people who already know how to do it. English, meanwhile, has borrowed the word for any slogan repeated in business or self-help, which is about as far from the original as a word can travel.

What the research says, and where it stops

None of the four studies behind this page tested mantra meditation by itself. They look at meditation, yoga, prayer or music therapy as broad groups, so what follows is evidence about the family of practices mantra belongs to. The most useful for understanding is a model from Crosswell and colleagues (2023) in Psychological Review. They propose that contemplative practices, prayer among them, bring on a restorative state they call “deep rest”, mostly by sending the body signals of safety. In that state, they argue, energy shifts away from stress responses and toward keeping cells in good order.

contemplative practicesafety signalsdeep restenergy toward cellular upkeep

It is a model drawn from several literatures, not a trial, and the authors say there is no consensus yet on the shared physical mechanisms.

The closest the evidence here comes to sound is a set of clinical guidelines. Greenlee and colleagues (2017), writing for the Society for Integrative Oncology after a review of studies from 1990 to 2015, recommended music therapy and meditation, among other practices, for anxiety and stress in people treated for breast cancer, and listed both again for low mood. That is one patient group, and the authors note that many integrative practices remain understudied.

Two reviews add context. Laird and colleagues (2019) list meditation and yoga among mind-body approaches that show promise for preventing and treating depression in later life, and call for more research. Van Aalst and colleagues (2020) reviewed 34 brain imaging studies of yoga and found some consistent patterns, including more gray matter in the insula and hippocampus and changes in the default mode network. They also found a lot of variation between yoga styles, small samples, and few comparison groups such as plain exercise, and mantra was not studied apart from the rest.

None of this tells you what sound adds on top of sitting quietly; that question is still open. If anxiety or low mood is shaping your days, see a doctor or a therapist, because a sound practice is not a treatment on its own.

Between the scholar who says the syllables mean nothing and the one who says they mean a great deal, there is room for one long out-breath that ends in a hum. You can start there tonight.