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Three Formulas Borrowing Tantric Technique While Refusing Its Theistic Frame

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Three Formulas Borrowing Tantric Technique While Refusing Its Theistic Frame

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Jainism Mantras gathers three formulas that show a mantra literature built on Hindu Tantric technical apparatus, seed syllables, yantras, syllable placement on the body, while refusing the theistic frame that usually accompanies it.

The Navkar Mantra, recited before anything else in Jain practice, is the central case: it salutes five categories of spiritual attainment and names no god, no founder and no individual, since Jainism holds that no being grants liberation and that the tirthankaras are examples rather than saviours. Both major Jain communities accept it in the same words, an agreement unusual enough that it is often called the mantra no Jain disputes. Arham, the seed syllable formed from arhat, the worthy one, extends the same refusal of a theistic object into contemplative practice and the diagrams called yantras, working on the practitioner rather than summoning anything external; some Jain sources treat its opening letter as containing the whole alphabet and so the whole of speech. Om Hreem Arham Namo Arihantanam takes that seed syllable and elaborates it with the invocatory Om and the additional bija Hreem into a fuller devotional formula used in puja, meditation and image bathing.

The three members together trace one line: a name-free, structure-carrying formula recited universally, its seed reduced further still, and a later devotional expansion of that seed for specific ritual settings the plainer form does not serve.

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Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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