Raja Yoga Sutras 16: Japa, and the Feeling Behind the Mantra

2026-09-21

Almost everyone who has tried a mantra has had the same experience. You repeat the words. Nothing appears to happen. You conclude, quietly and without saying it to anyone, that this particular door is closed to you. Sutra 28 of the Samadhi Pada anticipates that conclusion and refuses it. Patanjali’s line is taj-japah tad-artha-bhavanam, and it has two halves joined by nothing more than proximity. Repeat it. And dwell on what it means. The first half is what everybody attempts. The second half is the condition, and it is the half that quietly falls away first, because it is the half that cannot be counted on beads. This lecture is Swami Jyotirmayananda’s full treatment of that one sutra, and it is unusually practical for a talk on mysticism. He does not argue that mantra works. He explains the mechanism, letter by letter, and the explanation turns out to be about sound itself, about what particular sounds do to a nervous system and a mind, and about why the traditions that built mantras chose the syllables they chose rather than any others. Along the way he takes apart Om Sri Ramaya Namah one letter at a time, gives the three modes in which any mantra is repeated, reads the number 108 as a piece of numerical mysticism about what maya actually does to a life, and closes with the story of Hanuman cracking open a necklace of pearls to look inside each one. The test he offers for whether your practice is going rightly is not a mystical test at all. It is a test of how you feel afterwards.

Where each passage begins

Three scriptures, and why a yogi needs all of them

The lecture opens with the traditional verse of adoration to Patanjali, and Swamiji uses it to make a point about scope. Patanjali is credited with three works: a treatise on medicine for purifying the body, a treatise on grammar for purifying speech, and the Yoga Sutras for purifying the citta, the mind-stuff. Those three are not a curriculum you may sample from. They are one ideal. Swamiji is blunt about the first: “do not ignore your health in the name of spiritual movement.” Neglect the body and you will simply spend your meditation repeating what he calls the mantra of the toothache. The treatment of speech is the more surprising of the three, because it turns out not to be about grammar in the ordinary sense at all. The traditional formula is satyam vada, priyam vada, na vada satyam apriyam: “Speak the truth, but speak it pleasantly.” Swamiji’s reading is uncomfortable and worth sitting with. When you are about to say something true that will wound someone, look at your own motive honestly. In most cases, he says, the truth is being deployed because it will pinch. That is a failure of grammar in the deeper sense, and the truth so delivered becomes ineffective, because the person simply carries a grudge away instead of the fact. The third scripture concerns the mind, and he gives the classical image for why it needs purifying. A vessel of water reflects the sun. If the water is muddy, the reflection does not appear. Every mind reflects the divine being in exactly this way, and in most minds the reflection is unclear enough that what forms instead is a superficial concept of it, which is the ego, the sense of being a body, a mind, a set of senses. The consolation attached to this is one of the best moments in the opening. If the mind were purified past the point where ego could sit in it, you would not have lost anything. A river has an ego for as long as it is flowing. Once it enters the ocean, the ego is gone and the river is the ocean, which was always there. “And when a river loses its ego, there’s no loss. That’s a fulfillment.”

Why sound, and not just meaning

With that groundwork laid, Swamiji states the sutra and immediately does something unexpected. Rather than telling you which mantra to take, he explains why letters do anything at all. His argument is that every language on earth was built on a subtle observation of how sounds made by the tongue land on the nervous system, and through it on the mind. He gives small, almost comic demonstrations. Laughter transcends language entirely, and the H sound at the root of it shows up in the Sanskrit hasya, laughter, and hasta, the hand, the limb that does the good deeds from which joy comes. When a poet has a stormy feeling to convey, jarring sounds arrive in the language of their own accord. When the feeling is soft, the words are soft, and he invites you to notice how gentle the M, the E and the L are in a word like mellow. This is the science of the bijaksharas, the seed letters. It is why “Om is the source of all mantras.” The word is formed between the only two terminals speech possesses: the throat opens on A, the lips close on M, and everything a mouth can produce is implied between them. That is also why a speaker entering a noisy hall in the Indian tradition simply says Om. Nobody’s conversation is interrupted. Their sound is completed by it. He then gives the expansion of Om as a practice of identification rather than as a doctrine. A: you ordinarily regard yourself as the body, but the body is inseparable from the physical universe, so you may assert that you are the world. U: the individual mind relates to the cosmic mind. M: the individual causal body relates to the ruler of the universe. Beyond the three letters lies the transcendental reality that none of them names. Crucially, he notes that this practice does not depend on your condition. The nerves may be aching, and the understanding goes on developing anyway. And for anyone who finds the metaphysics too much, he gives permission to drop it: use Om with the simple understanding that you are turning your mind toward God, and the subtler meanings will arrive on their own. The last observation on Om is the most striking. Thought requires a sound pattern; worry is the mind using a language. “Oṃ sucks the language. So therefore, nothing to think about.”

The error that is not even kindergarten

Before the worked example, Swamiji stops to remove an obstacle, and he removes it sharply. Mantras differ because aspirants differ. God has countless aspects, one person needs one of them for their evolution and another needs another, and so there is Om Sri Ramaya Namah for those drawn to Rama, Om Sri Krishnaya Namah for those drawn to Krishna, Om Sri Mahalakshmi Namah for the devotees of Lakshmi, and, for anyone whose upbringing points there, Om used with the name of Christ. What must not follow is the idea that these are competing claims. To worry that repeating one name offends the holder of another, or to conclude that your mantra makes you the superior of someone with a different one, is a mistake he refuses to dignify. It is, in his phrase, not even kindergarten. If you worship Rama, Siva is pleased, Jesus is pleased, Buddha is pleased. “Any aspect you choose is an aspect of God.” The reasoning underneath is about symbolism. A devotee of Jesus keeps a picture of Jesus, having never seen him; Chinese artists give him a flatter nose; the historical person did not know that name. None of this is a scandal once you see that the entire register is symbolic, and that symbolism permits complete flexibility. You are not offending anyone. You are using the only equipment a human mind has for approaching what has no form, and whatever form relaxes your mind is the right one for you to use. From the picture you move to the abstract: what the divine presence means to you, framed in human terms as the presence of a mother or father whose heart is cosmic, who will not audit the small details of your troubles and defects, and who is ready to forgive. From the abstract you are led further still, to a state in which thought is silenced and the mind itself is transcended, where what remains has no name and no form at all.

Om Sri Ramaya Namah, letter by letter

This is the centre of the lecture, and it is where the earlier material on seed sounds pays off. Swamiji takes a single mantra and reads it as an instruction rather than a formula. *Om* invokes the Absolute. That is the opening move, and it sets the register for everything that follows. *Sri* spreads the red carpet. The syllable precedes any name that is being honoured, and the honouring is not a courtesy. It connects to centres that allow the mind to be positive, and a positive mind draws prosperity. What you are actually laying down when you say it, he says, is compassion, forgiveness, humility, goodness of the heart. Those are the carpet. That is what draws the grace the syllable names. *Ra wakes what is asleep. It is the awakener, the sound that appears in run and rise, and it relates to the Manipura chakra* at the navel. Your spiritual potential is sleeping; this is the sound that makes it vibrant, the way sunlight is given to a tree, though he adds the obvious caution that too much sun burns. *Ma is the moon, showering nectar. Children everywhere enter language through it, calling for the mother, and they do so even in languages that lack the sound. Sanskrit keeps it in chandrama*, the moon. Where Ra created fire, Ma draws nectar, and he points out that you need both sun and water. *Ya is the root letter of the heart, preserved in the Sanskrit hridayam* and audible in the sound people make anywhere in the world when something pleases them. So the sequence is not decorative. You wake the sleeping potential, you lead it to a fulfilment like nectar, and all of this happens in the heart and nowhere outside it, at a level where consciousness expands. *Namah* is the negation: neither me nor mine. He gives this considerable weight by running it across lifetimes. A hundred years ago your “me” was a different body with a different appearance and identity, and your “mine” was a different library of possessions, children, grandchildren, none of which came with you. Nature is kind in withholding those memories, but it does allow the knowledge and the lessons to pass. His illustration is a person who took up music at seventy in a previous life and barely began, who is then drawn karmically into a family of musicians with an instrument already in the house, never questions the inclination, and sometimes outstrips the teacher. This is also, he notes, why the ordinary greeting is the most effective thing we say to one another. In namaste the meaning is “I’m adoring God in you, not me and mine.” Both hands fold because you and I are one in the heart.

How it is actually practised

The practical instruction is short and unglamorous. A mantra is repeated in three modes: vaikhari, comfortably aloud; upamsu, whispered, using some of the lips and throat, so that hardly anyone hears it and hardly you do; and manasika, purely mental, where the mind holds the mantra and watches its stress being drawn up into it. You begin loud, and as the mind relaxes you descend through the other two. The mala has 108 beads, and he reads the number as mysticism rather than arithmetic. Eight relates to illusion: doubled it becomes 16, which is larger in bulk while its digits reduce to 7, and doubled again it becomes 32, larger still while reducing to 5. The bulk increases and the substance decreases, and that is precisely what maya does. His example is a large lottery win, where the bulk is the sum and the substance is what the sum does to the person who receives it. But one and eight give nine, and nine is mathematically incorruptible, since any multiple of nine has digits that reduce to nine again. So 108 is a figure of victory carried through the world of illusion, which is also why the Gita has eighteen chapters and the Mahabharata eighteen books. Then comes the test, and it is the most useful sentence in the lecture for anyone actually practising: “the recitation of mantra should not leave you tired, exhausted. Leave you refreshed.” The feeling to cultivate is that of a child who has taken something sweet. Repetition that grinds has lost the bhavana, the feeling of the meaning, which is the second half of the sutra. He guards that against discouragement immediately, because the obvious objection is that some days it simply does not feel sweet. “mantra is a kind of medicine.” You do not have to like the medicine. The subtle effect enters regardless, and “And that is infallible. It will never fail.” Restating the sutra, he adds the direction of travel: go on repeating, for the sake of the ultimate truth rather than for anything transient, and “your bhāvanā, your feeling should go on blossoming.” Mahatma Gandhi counted on a mantra through his challenges, as did Tulsidas and Valmiki before him. The last movement describes how far the influence travels. Repetition begins in the vocal mechanism and soaks downward into the unconscious with a touch of the divine presence. It reaches the intellect, which turns toward viveka shakti, the discriminating power that knows the Self from the not-Self. It reaches the mind, so that in the ordinary business of planning and deciding you receive a subtle guidance while believing the choices are entirely your own. It reaches speech and action. “You are permeated by the magic of mantra.”

Hanuman and the pearls

The lecture ends on a story, and it earns its place. Rama has returned to Ayodhya and been seated on the throne. Sita gives Hanuman a necklace of pearls in appreciation of everything he has done, and the court is jealous. Hanuman then begins breaking the pearls open one by one, cracking them with his teeth when his hands will not do it. The court is appalled: Sita has given you something precious and you do not recognise what it is. Hanuman says he is looking to see whether Rama’s name is inside. They ask him whether Rama’s name is in his own heart, and he tears his chest open, and Rama shines out of it. Swamiji marks the register himself before anyone can mistake it: “Mystical story, not to be taken literally.” The meaning is that the costliest and best jewels of the world amount to nothing beside one thing. “What matters is awareness of divine presence within you.” And it is not to stop at the body or the mind. It goes deep into the heart, which is where, in the story, it was found.

Terms used in this lecture

japa — the repetition of a divine name or mantra, aloud, whispered or mentally
taj japah tad artha bhavanam — sutra 28: repeat it, and dwell on the meaning of it
bhavana — the felt sense of what a mantra points to, the second half of the sutra
mantra — a sound that, repeated, turns the mind toward the divine and leads it to liberation
bijakshara — a seed letter, a sound chosen for its effect rather than its dictionary meaning
pranava — Om, the root sound formed between the throat and the lips
mantra diksha — formal initiation into a mantra by a teacher
mala — the rosary of 108 beads on which repetitions are counted
vaikhari — repetition aloud, the mode a practice usually begins in
upamsu — whispered repetition, barely audible even to oneself
manasika — purely mental repetition
namah — the negation of me and mine with which many mantras close
Manipura chakra — the centre at the navel, associated with the sound Ra
viveka shakti — the discriminating power that distinguishes the Self from the not-Self
citta — the mind-stuff, the material the Yoga Sutras are concerned with purifying

Questions to sit with

When your own repetition has felt like a chore rather than something sweet, was it the practice that had gone wrong, or the second half of the sutra that had quietly dropped out of it?
Swamiji says that in most cases a wounding truth is being spoken in order to wound; is there a conversation you are planning where that is closer to true than you would like?
Hanuman looked for the name inside the pearls before he looked inside himself, which of those two searches takes up more of your week?

Raja Yoga Sutras, Samadhi Pada, sutra 28. Lecture 16 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete archive of Swamiji’s lectures is free to all.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.