Asato Ma Sadgamaya Mantra

What the Asato Ma Sadgamaya is

Asato Ma Sadgamaya names no deity. It is three first-person requests: to be taken out of what is not into what is, out of darkness into light, out of death into the deathless. The lines stand at 1.3.28 of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the closing book of the Shatapatha Brahmana of the Shukla Yajurveda, and they are prose formulas rather than metrical verse. The Upanishad calls them the abhyaroha, the 'ascent', of the pavamana chants, the Soma chants that give the formula its other name. Each line turns on the same verb, gamaya, 'cause to go', with ma, 'me', as its object, so the speaker asks to be moved rather than to be given anything. The Upanishad then glosses its own words: the unreal and darkness both mean death, the real and light both mean immortality, so all three lines say one thing, 'make me immortal'. The opening Om and the closing 'Om shantih shantih shantih' belong to later chanting; in the Upanishad the passage ends with gamayeti.

Muttered as the Soma chant began

The lines close an account of the udgitha, the sung core of the Soma sacrifice. Brahmana 1.3 opens with the two families born of Prajapati, the gods and the asuras, contending for the worlds. The gods, the fewer of the two, resolved to get past their rivals through the udgitha and asked speech to sing it for them. Speech sang, but kept fine speaking for itself, and the asuras pierced it with evil. Smell, sight, hearing and mind failed in the same way. The gods then turned to the breath in the mouth, and when the asuras rushed at it they scattered like a clod of earth flung against a stone. That breath is named Ayasya Angirasa, the essence of the limbs. Verse 28 draws the ritual rule out of this knowledge. When the prastotr, the priest who opens a saman, begins the pavamana chants, the yajamana, the patron of the rite, is to mutter these three lines. Adi Shankara's commentary explains the word abhyaroha: through this muttering, one who knows the breath rises towards divinity. The verse adds that in the remaining chants the udgatr who knows this may sing food for the singer's own sake, or whatever wish the patron names, and it calls such knowledge world-winning.

The mantra, in six scripts

The syllable people get wrong

The third line joins mā, 'me', and amṛtaṃ, 'immortality', into one word, mṛtyormāmṛtaṃ, with a single long ā where the two vowels meet. Say mrit-yor-MAAM-ri-tam without a pause, not 'mrityor ma amritam' as three words with a break before amṛtaṃ.

Questions