A Mantra That Is an Alphabet

Om A Ra Pa Ca Na Dhih is the mantra of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, recited by students before study and examinations. What is unusual about it is that its core, arapacana, is not invented sound but an alphabet: the arapacana is an ordering of syllables known from Gandharan Buddhist texts, and in the Perfection of Wisdom literature each of its letters is made the head of a meditation on a term of the teaching, a for the unarisen nature of things, and so on, so that reciting the sequence recalls a whole syllabary of insight.

The concluding dhih is Manjushri's seed syllable, and practitioners often repeat it a number of extra times at the end, on the last breath, to sharpen the intellect the bodhisattva embodies. Manjushri, who wields a sword that cuts through ignorance and holds the book of the Perfection of Wisdom, personifies the discriminating wisdom that sees emptiness, and his mantra accordingly attaches the cultivation of intelligence to a formula whose very structure is an act of literacy. It is a clear case of the Buddhist tendency to build contemplative meaning into the mechanics of sound and script.