The Origins of Om Manipadme Hum: A Study of the Karandavyuha Sutra

Alexander Studholme's The Origins of Om Manipadme Hum, A Study of the Karandavyuha Sutra, published by the State University of New York Press in 2002, is the standard scholarly monograph on the emergence of the six syllable mantra Om Mani Padme Hum in India around the middle of the first millennium CE, built around a detailed annotated precis of the Karandavyuha Sutra, the text in which the mantra first appears in connection with Avalokitesvara. Its strength is that it is a peer reviewed university press monograph and remains the most sustained scholarly treatment of the mantra's textual origin specifically, filling a gap many broader Buddhist studies leave unaddressed. Its limit is that it traces the mantra's earliest documented textual appearance rather than its full later doctrinal development across Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism, so a claim about later interpretive traditions needs sources specific to those traditions.