Shared Across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism

Om is not confined to one religion. In Hinduism it prefaces most mantras and is treated as the sound-form of Brahman. Buddhism carries it into mantra, most famously Om mani padme hum, and into Vajrayana ritual, where Om, Ah and Hum mark body, speech and mind. Jainism reads Om as a compression of the Panca-Namaskara, the fivefold homage, formed from the initials of its five honoured beings. Sikh scripture opens with Ik Onkar, in which onkar is cognate, though Sikh theology reads it strictly as the one God and keeps its distance from pluralist metaphysics. The visual symbol's worldwide circulation on jewellery and studio walls is modern and frequently detached from any of these liturgical settings.

Sikh scripture's opening formula, Ik Onkar, sits at the very start of the Guru Granth Sahib and is written as a numeral one followed by a character related to the Om syllable, a visual kinship Sikh commentators are generally careful to qualify: the Gurus drew on the wider North Indian devotional vocabulary that included Om while insisting on a strictly monotheistic reading that rejects the pluralist and impersonal readings some later Hindu philosophy gives the same syllable. Jainism's fivefold reading of Om as a contraction of the Panca-Namaskara, homage to the liberated souls, the perfected, the spiritual leaders, the teachers and all ascetics, gives the syllable a devotional rather than cosmological meaning distinct from both the Vedantic and Sikh readings, evidence that a single sound accumulated genuinely different theological content across the traditions that adopted it rather than carrying one stable meaning outward from a single source.