Most sutras that contain a mantra simply give it. The Karandavyuha does something stranger: it builds its second half around the difficulty of getting hold of one. The Buddha describes a bodhisattva's search for the sadaksari, the six-syllable formula that is called the innermost heart of Avalokiteshvara, and the search is long, the holder of the formula is hard to find, and the transmission when it comes is a considerable event. The device is not decoration. It is the sutra's argument about what the mantra is worth.
The six syllables are Om Manipadme Hum. The sutra is the earliest text in which they appear, which is why this atlas files the mantra here and not in the Pali canon; the phrase is Sanskrit, it is Mahayana, and it is absent from the Tipitaka entirely. The Sanskrit itself is disputed. The old popular gloss, "the jewel in the lotus", takes manipadme as a compound in the locative. Most specialists now read it instead as a vocative feminine, Manipadma, "Jewel-Lotus", a form of address to a consort figure of Avalokiteshvara, which makes the mantra a calling of a name rather than a statement about a jewel. Neither reading is certain and the atlas reports both.
The Avalokiteshvara of this sutra is not a modest saint. His body is described as containing worlds; from his pores whole realms and their gods emerge; he descends into the hells and into the realm of the hungry ghosts and empties them. Alexander Studholme has argued that this cosmic figure, and the structure of a supreme deity with a short syllabic mantra at his heart, is built on a Shaiva model, that Om Manipadme Hum stands to Avalokiteshvara much as Namah Shivaya stands to Shiva, and that the sutra belongs to a period when Buddhist devotional literature was in close conversation with Puranic religion.