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Swamiji on Mantra

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Swamiji on Mantra

A discourse by Paramahamsa Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati, given on a Delhi evening before mantra dīkṣā

A Note Before the Discourse

Swamiji was in Delhi for a two-day yoga awareness session on 1st and 2nd May, 2026. On one of the evenings, before giving mantra dīkṣā to the people gathered, he spoke about what mantra is, why it matters, and how to begin. He spoke in Hindi. I have transcribed manually, in English, trying to keep the cadence of his Hindi as close to the original as I could without bending it into an idiom that was not his.

What follows is his teaching. Where his words touched the older books, I have placed quiet references in the footnotes — to the Yoga Darśana of Patañjali, to the Upaniṣads, to the Bhagavad Gītā, and to the Tantric corpus from which the definition of mantra itself is drawn. The references are not commentary on Swamiji. They are notes from one student trying to show where this living tradition meets the texts that have carried it for centuries.

Swamiji is the successor of Paramahamsa Swami Satyananda Saraswati, who himself was a disciple of Swami Sivananda Saraswati of Rishikesh. He is the head of the Bihar School of Yoga and one of the few exponents of the complete yogic tradition still teaching in our time. To sit before him on an evening like this and to receive his words on mantra is rare. To pass these words on, even imperfectly, is the only way I know to keep the bhaav going.

The discourse begins now.

I. The Meaning of Dīkṣā

The meaning of दीक्षा (dīkṣā, initiation) is to adopt a new awareness and a new point of view. In our योग दर्शन (yoga darśana, the philosophy of yoga), dīkṣā is a component of यम (yama) and नियम (niyama).

Those who have a little understanding of the yoga darśana - if they are asked about yama and niyama, they will mostly refer to the yamas and niyamas mentioned in the Pātañjala Yoga Darśana, like सत्य (satya, truthfulness), अहिंसा (ahiṃsā, non-violence), अस्तेय (asteya, non-stealing), ब्रह्मचर्य (brahmacarya, conservation of vital energy), among others.1 But these are the advanced yamas and niyamas. They are the syllabus of the University. What is it as per the syllabus of the Primary School, where you go to learn the building blocks?

There are yamas and niyamas enunciated in every branch of yoga. A yogic lifestyle also has its own set of yamas and niyamas. The first yama of the yogic lifestyle is happiness — also known as मनः प्रसाद (manaḥ prasāda) — and the first niyama is जप (japa).

This is a teaching one will not easily find in commentaries on the Yoga Sūtras. It belongs to the living oral tradition of the Bihar School, where the practitioner is met where they are. Before truthfulness, before non-violence, before all the lofty virtues, you are first asked: are you happy? And if you are not, can you sit and do japa?

II. The First Yama: Manaḥ Prasāda

प्रसाद (prasāda) itself means something that makes you happy - like the simple prasāda you receive when you visit any temple. It can be a simple water with a tulsī leaf, but even then, just by having that prasāda, you feel elevated and abundant, that you have the blessings of God Almighty on you.

When you have trouble in life, then it is very difficult to keep yourself happy. But the person who can keep himself happy in any circumstance, that person does not have to go through suffering. Because happiness is a state of mind that saves the mind from its own narrow outlook and expressions.

Patanjali himself names this state as one of the four attitudes that purify consciousness: मैत्री (maitrī, friendliness), करुणा (karuṇā, compassion), मुदिता (muditā, gladness at the good fortune of others) and उपेक्षा (upekṣā, equanimity towards the wicked). The sūtra is — maitrī-karuṇā-muditopekṣāṇāṃ sukha-duḥkha-puṇyāpuṇya-viṣayāṇāṃ bhāvanātaḥ citta-prasādanam — “the mind becomes purified by cultivating these attitudes.”2 The word Patañjali uses is citta-prasādana — exactly the prasāda that Swamiji is pointing to. And in his second pāda, Patañjali names संतोष (santoṣa, contentment) as a niyama, with the promise that santoṣād anuttamaḥ sukha-lābhaḥ — “from contentment comes the highest happiness.”3 Swamiji is not adding a new yama. He is naming the gate that everyone must walk through before the higher gates open.

III. The First Niyama: Japa, the Recharging of the Inner Battery

Twenty-four hours a day, we are in contact with the world around us, with our near and dear ones. When we sleep at night, we sleep with the problems that surround us, with the expectations that we have on us, worrying about the difficulties that we have. We sleep with worry. So how will you get rest, because your mind and all your six senses are attached to your own pain and difficulties?

Yogis and our ancestors have said that there should be sometime within these twenty-four hours where you keep yourself away from the world around you and recharge your internal battery. And that is why, at the entrance of yoga, as a niyama — niyama is something that you have to do, whereas yama is something you keep in your own mind — they kept japa as the first of the niyamas.

Because when you do mantra japa, even if it is for ten minutes, your mind switches itself from focusing on your own problems to a different awareness, which is a centre of your devotion. When this happens, we forget our own issues in life and realise our own internal strength, mental clarity, the peace from which we kept ourselves away the entire day. And at this instant, our mind, our intellect, our emotions and our senses get a time to rest.

If you keep the torch light on, how long will the battery last?

How many times has it happened to you that you do not feel like getting up from bed. You feel exhausted after a night of sleep. How many times has it happened to you? It means that your battery has not been charged, and your sub-conscious and the un-conscious mind was in a state of worry along.

So to dissociate your mind from your own troubles, difficulties and distress is an art. And this art is perfected through mantra.

Patañjali, in his shortest definition of the path, calls this preparatory yoga क्रिया योग (kriyā yoga) — tapaḥ-svādhyāyeśvara-praṇidhānāni kriyā-yogaḥ — and the second of these three is svādhyāya, which the classical commentator Vyāsa explicitly defines as the japa of mantras such as praṇava (Om) and the study of liberating texts.4 The Lord Himself in the Bhagavad Gītā says — yajñānāṃ japa-yajño ‘smi — “of all sacrifices, I am the sacrifice of japa.”5 The placement is exact. Of all the things you can offer, the one that the Divine identifies with most directly is the silent repetition of the name. Swamiji is restoring this teaching to its original place: not at the end of a long yogic path, but at its very entrance. The first thing.

IV. What Mantra Is — Mananāt Trāyate Iti Mantraḥ

The definition of mantra is —

मननात् त्रायते इति मंत्रः

mananāt trāyate iti mantraḥ

To free oneself from the mind. When the same thought keeps coming to your mind one after the other, when you keep on ruminating and it makes you uncomfortable, this is called a state of worry. To extract yourself from this process — this is what mantra is.

This definition itself is from the Tantric corpus, found in the Kulārṇava Tantra: mananāt trāyate yasmāt tasmāt mantra iti smṛtaḥ — “because it protects the one who reflects upon it, it is therefore called mantra.”6 The two roots are मनन (manana, sustained reflection or holding-in-mind) and त्राण (trāṇa, protection, deliverance). A mantra is, by its own etymology, a sound that delivers the one who holds it.

You might not be knowing something. In the state of wakefulness, how many thoughts do you get in a day? Close to fifty to sixty thousand. And all these thoughts are not all in the conscious mind. Only some of them surface on the conscious mind. But the ripples that you see on the surface of the lake are a resultant of some inner cause, and those ripples are very different. Look at the ocean, how the inner waves are different from what you see on the shore. In a similar fashion, you are only aware of those thoughts that come up to the surface, and they force you to think on them. But at the level of the subconscious or the unconscious mind, thousands and thousands of thoughts come to you.

Another piece of information is that seventy percent of the thoughts are repeated thoughts, and this is the cause of distress in your mind. Also seventy percent of the thoughts that you get are negative. That means only thirty percent of our thinking is positive. And this is our personality that we hide from other people, but it reflects in our behaviour. It reflects in arrogance and false pride, reflects in jealousy and envy, craving, anger, and over-attachment. All of these six षड्रिपु (ṣaḍripu, the six inner enemies)7 are negative. And within this playground, to establish peace is the objective of mantra.

Something that can absolve our mind from the variations of the mind and the recurring negative thoughts — that power is mantra.

What Swamiji is describing in the language of yoga, contemporary cognitive science describes in the language of the [[Default Mode Network|default mode network]] — the set of brain regions that activate when the mind is not engaged in a task and which mediate self-referential thought, mind-wandering, and rumination.8 The phenomenon is identical: a mind left to itself returns again and again to a small set of repetitive, often negatively-toned, self-narratives. The yogis did not need an MRI to see this. They saw it in their own inner observation, and they offered the remedy three thousand years before the imaging confirmed the diagnosis.

And mantras are not religious. Never. They are the internal vibrations of our own selves. And these mantras have been experienced by yogis in their deep meditations. When they became their own द्रष्टा (draṣṭā, the seer) and their own साक्षी (sākṣī, the witness), when they got to know themselves fully — it was then that they experienced mantras and their vibrations. And this is called mantras.

The Yoga Sūtra opens its very first definitional chapter with this same idea: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ — yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind-stuff — tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe ‘vasthānam — then the seer rests in his own true form.9 Mantra is the practical instrument of that resting.

V. Mantra as the Companion That Does Not Leave

Mantra is a companion of your life — be it a householder or a sannyāsī. Home and families come and go, people come and go, but mantra always remains with you. Fashion can change always, eating and drinking conventions change, but something that has not changed since time immemorial is mantra.

People have also taken advantage of it. I am saying it clearly. But its original objective is what I am telling you today.

The greatest guṇa of life is शिष्यत्व (śiṣyatva, the quality of being a disciple).

Because you do not have to think anything in this state.

This is among the most quietly profound things Swamiji said that evening. The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad enjoins — tad-vijñānārthaṃ sa gurum evābhigacchet — “for the knowledge of That, one must approach a teacher.”10 And the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad ends with the verse on which the entire guru-śiṣya tradition rests: yasya deve parā bhaktiḥ yathā deve tathā gurau / tasyaite kathitā hyarthāḥ prakāśante mahātmanaḥ — “to the great soul who has supreme devotion to the Divine, and as much devotion to the guru as to the Divine, the meanings of these teachings shine forth.”11 To enter the state of śiṣyatva is to set down, even briefly, the apparatus of one’s own thinking. The mantra received from such a teacher is not a personal possession; it is a thread that runs back through the lineage to the silence from which it first arose.

VI. Mantra and the Cakras — A Sādhanā, Not a Religion

The association of mantra is with the चक्र (cakra, the energy centres) that reside within us.

I will give an example. Let us say the mantra is Om Namaḥ Śivāya*. At the societal level, people say that this is the mantra of Lord Shiva. But I always say that before the feeling of the god Shiva arose to a public consciousness, these mantras were discovered by our ṛṣis and munis because they have an association with our cakras.*

ॐ (Om) is the vibration of the आज्ञा चक्र (ājñā cakra, the centre between the eyebrows). Na, Maḥ, Śi, Vā, Yaḥ — called the पञ्चाक्षरी (pañcākṣarī, the five-syllable mantra) — correspond to different cakras. For example, Yaḥ is the bīja of the अनाहत चक्र (anāhata cakra, the heart centre). Vā is the mantra of the स्वाधिष्ठान चक्र (svādhiṣṭhāna cakra, the sacral centre). Śi is the mantra of the विशुद्धि चक्र (viśuddhi cakra, the throat centre). And Na and Maḥ are the vibrations of the मणिपुर चक्र (maṇipūra cakra, the navel centre).

So when we chant Om Namaḥ Śivāya*, we are affecting the cakras through the vibrations of the prāṇas.*

So which religion does it belong to? This is just a sādhanā. And yogis know this.

A note for those who have studied the Tantric texts: the standard chakra-bījas in classical literature are Laṃ, Vaṃ, Raṃ, Yaṃ, Haṃ (corresponding to the five gross elements at mūlādhāra through viśuddhi) with Om at ājñā.12 Swamiji’s mapping of Om Namaḥ Śivāya onto the cakras is a complementary, experiential correspondence — what happens in the prāṇic field when this particular mahāmantra is chanted with awareness — and it belongs to the lived tradition of the Bihar School. Both frameworks are true and Swamiji’s reference more respectable and deferential because its an experiential claim from perhaps the greatest living yogi (of all times); they describe the same instrument from different angles. The deeper claim Swamiji is making is the one to keep: the mantra does not belong to a religion. It belongs to the human nervous system, to the system of nāḍīs and cakras, and to the consciousness that is its silent ground.

So this vidhi — this method of doing the mantra and the mantra sādhanā — this is the biggest achievement of our civilisation, of our culture. We just have to remove it from religion and imbibe it within us.

VII. Two Ways of Doing Mantra Sādhanā

How are we supposed to do mantra sādhanā? There are two ways.

First, the साधनात्मक way (sādhanātmaka, the formal way). Sit quietly — my recommendation is at nighttime. The pandits and religions say in the morning. Yoga says at night, when we are relieved from all our work, and there is quietness at home, and there is no deadline that we have to meet. Take ten to fifteen minutes off and sit in a quiet, dark room. The environment is calm. Sit in a comfortable posture and make yourself physically still. Take your awareness to your breath. Take the माला (mālā, the rosary) in your hand and catch hold of the first bead and repeat your mantra. Then catch hold of the second bead and repeat your mantra. And so on. This is the sādhanātmaka way of doing mantra.

Second, the सहज way (sahaja, the natural or spontaneous way). Travelling, walking, sitting, eating — you are doing the japa of mantra in your mind, whether it is for thirty seconds or one minute or five minutes. It is just that the mantra should be in your स्मरण (smaraṇa, remembrance). The ability to have smaraṇa is a great power.

The classical texts of japa-yoga distinguish three modes — वैखरी (vaikharī, audible), उपांशु (upāṃśu, whispered) and मानसिक (mānasika, mental) — and consider the mental japa to be the highest and most subtle.13 Swamiji’s two-fold division is the practical one: there is the time you sit, and there is the rest of the day. The mark of progress is when the rest of the day also becomes japa.

A small word on the night-versus-morning question. The pre-dawn ब्रह्ममुहूर्त (brahma-muhūrta, roughly 4:30–5:30 a.m.) is the oft heard recommendation of the rituals. Yoga’s preference for night is rooted in physiology and in the law of the guṇas — the तमस् (tamas) of late evening, when worked upon by mantra, transmutes most directly into सत्त्व (sattva), and one carries that sattva into sleep, where the deepest unconscious work is done. Either time is correct. The practice is the thing.

VIII. Peace First, Then Everything

If a human being is not at peace, there is no progress.

When you get peace in life, everything just happens — both spiritually and materially. We become agitated and run after material peace and comfort, but yoga says: first make yourself at peace, and everything around you will come together the way it was supposed to be.

This single sentence reverses the order in which most of us live. The Yoga Sūtras open with the same reversal — yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ — and close the second pāda with the promise that from the establishment of the yamas and niyamas, the practitioner gains the foundation upon which all the inner attainments rest.14 First the citta is settled. Then everything else.

IX. Closing

So I was telling you all about mantra, especially to those who are taking mantra dīkṣā today. Either mantra sādhanā at night or sahaja mantra at any time in the day. And with this you will get internal strength and clarity, and you will get inspired to do श्रेष्ठ कर्म (śreṣṭha karma, action of the highest order).

This is what I had to say about mantra.

A Note After the Discourse

There are teachers, and there are teachers in whose presence the room itself becomes still. To hear these words spoken in Hindi, in Swamiji’s voice, with the unhurried rhythm of a man who has spent previous births and decades in the practice he is describing, was to feel that the words had been waiting a long time to be said in exactly this way. The translation here cannot carry the silence that surrounded each sentence. What it can do is preserve the structure of the teaching, so that those who could not be in the room that evening can still receive the practice.

If a single thing is to be carried away from this discourse, perhaps it is this: mantra is not a religious object. It is the instrument by which the mind is freed from itself. The yogis discovered it. They handed it down for our benefit. The first niyama, before all the higher virtues, is to sit and do japa, even for ten minutes, even at night, even in the middle of a difficult life. Charge the battery. The rest will follow.

— Transcribed and arranged from the discourse, in gratitude.

Notes and Sources

Paramahamsa Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati is the spiritual successor of Swami Satyananda Saraswati and the head of the Bihar School of Yoga, Munger. He has been initiated into the Daśanāmī sannyāsa tradition and has spent his life in the transmission of the integral yogic path.

Footnotes

  1. Patanjali, Yoga Sūtra 2.30: ahiṃsā-satyāsteya-brahmacaryāparigrahā yamāḥ — “non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, conservation of vital energy, and non-possessiveness are the yamas.” And Yoga Sūtra 2.32: śauca-santoṣa-tapaḥ-svādhyāyeśvara-praṇidhānāni niyamāḥ — “purity, contentment, austerity, self-study, and surrender to the Divine are the niyamas.” ↩

  2. Yoga Sūtra 1.33. ↩

  3. Yoga Sūtra 2.42. ↩

  4. Yoga Sūtra 2.1: tapaḥ-svādhyāyeśvara-praṇidhānāni kriyā-yogaḥ. Vyāsa, in his commentary (Vyāsa Bhāṣya), defines svādhyāya as “the japa of purifying mantras such as praṇava, and the study of texts that lead to liberation” — svādhyāyaḥ praṇavādi-pavitrāṇāṃ japo mokṣa-śāstrādhyayanaṃ vā. Patañjali develops the praṇava-japa teaching across Yoga Sūtra 1.27 — tasya vācakaḥ praṇavaḥ (“its expressive sound is praṇava, Om”) — and 1.28 — taj-japas tad-artha-bhāvanam (“the japa of that and the contemplation of its meaning [is the practice]”). ↩

  5. Bhagavad Gītā 10.25. ↩

  6. Kulārṇava Tantra 17.54. The fuller verse — mananāt trāyate yasmāt tasmāt mantra iti smṛtaḥ — is among the most quoted definitions of mantra across the Tantric and Vedantic literature. ↩

  7. The standard enumeration of the ṣaḍripu in the Vedantic and Purāṇic tradition is kāma (lust/craving), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (delusion/over-attachment), mada (pride/arrogance), and mātsarya (envy/jealousy). Swamiji’s listing — arrogance and false pride, jealousy and envy, craving, anger, over-attachment — maps directly onto this classical set. ↩

  8. The default mode network was first systematically described by Marcus Raichle and colleagues in the early 2000s. Subsequent work — including studies on long-term meditators by Brewer et al. (Yale, 2011) and on rumination and depression — has shown that sustained meditative and mantra-based practices produce measurable down-regulation of DMN activity. The estimate of 50,000–60,000 thoughts per day is a popular figure that originated in mid-twentieth-century psychology and has been refined by more recent work (Tseng & Poppenk, Nature Communications, 2020, identified roughly 6,200 distinct “thought worms” per day in young adults). The specific number is less important than the underlying observation, which is robustly supported: the untrained mind generates a continuous, largely repetitive, and disproportionately negatively-valenced stream of self-referential cognition. ↩

  9. Yoga Sūtra 1.2 and 1.3. ↩

  10. Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.2.12: tad-vijñānārthaṃ sa gurum evābhigacchet samit-pāṇiḥ śrotriyaṃ brahma-niṣṭham — “for the knowledge of That, he should approach a teacher, fuel-stick in hand, learned in the scriptures and established in Brahman.” ↩

  11. Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 6.23. ↩

  12. For the standard chakra-bījas, see the Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa of Pūrṇānanda (sixteenth century), translated and discussed by Sir John Woodroffe in The Serpent Power. For the Bihar School’s exposition of mantra and its correspondences in the body, see Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Kuṇḍalinī Tantra, and Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati, Prāṇa and Prāṇāyāma. ↩

  13. See Swami Sivananda, Japa Yoga: A Comprehensive Treatise on Mantra-Sastra (Divine Life Society), and the relevant sections of the Liṅga Purāṇa and Garuḍa Purāṇa on the modes of japa. The mānasika japa is generally said to be a hundred times more potent than the audible. ↩

  14. Yoga Sūtra 2.35–2.45 traces the specific siddhis or accomplishments that arise from the firm establishment of each yama and niyama — beginning with non-violence and ending with the samādhi-siddhi that arises from īśvara-praṇidhāna. ↩

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