[Advaita-l] Hare Rama

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

There may be historical reasons for manuscript variations or there may have been specific doctrinal reasons for different teachers to teach different sequences in a mantra. One must remember that a mantra is chanted not just once, but many times in succession. So when establishing a saMtati in repeating any mantra, one could parse it either way, without getting too bothered about which is "correct".

 

Surely, you remember the south Indian story about how vAlmIkI could not say the word rAma, but could say mara (= tree), so he was taught to repeat marA, marA, marA, ... which by continous repetition over time transformed into rAma, rAma, rAma, ...

 

The possibility of this happening is what is meant by saying that the order does not matter.

 

Vidyasankar


 

> To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> From: rajaramvenk at gmail.com
> Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 06:09:25 +0000
> Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Hare Rama
> 
> I don't know what you mean the order doesn't matter. No one, advaitin or otherwise, should change the mantras in the upanishad. it would be whimsical. Like I said there are three textual references (two versions of the kali santarana manuscript and radha tantra). We should critically evaluate the texts.
> 
> For this mantra, there is no regulation whatsoever as per the upanishad. Does any one know what are the 16 kalas of the jIvA talked of in the upanishad please?
> 
> 
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>