Karandavyuha Sutra

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.

In India the Karandavyuha was one text among many. In Tibet it became foundational. It was translated in the imperial period, and the picture it gives, Avalokiteshvara as the being who has taken responsibility for a particular land and its people, was taken up as an account of Tibet itself. From that grew the identification of the emperor Songtsen Gampo, and later of the Dalai Lamas, as emanations of Avalokiteshvara, and the universal recitation of the six syllables by lay Tibetans, carved on stones, printed on flags and turned in prayer wheels. Few sutras have had so direct an effect on the self-understanding of a whole society.

It travelled east as well. A Chinese translation was made under the Song, and the mantra spread through East Asian Buddhism, though never with the saturation it reached in Tibet. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism notes the sutra chiefly for this: it is the scriptural source of the most recited mantra in the Buddhist world.

A caution about what the sutra is not. Its exalted Avalokiteshvara sits awkwardly with the Perfection of Wisdom literature, where the same bodhisattva teaches emptiness and where no formula has saving power in itself; the Heart Sutra's mantra is a summary of a teaching, not a key to a realm. Buddhist tradition has held the two together for a millennium and a half without much difficulty. A reader who meets only one of them will get a lopsided picture of what Avalokiteshvara means.