Ashtalakshmi Mantra

What the Ashtalakshmi Mantra is

The Ashta Lakshmi Mantra, often searched as the Ashtalakshmi mantra, is eight short name mantras, each saluting one form of Lakshmi as 'Om ... lakshmyai namah'. Adi Lakshmi is the primordial goddess, the first form from which tradition says the others issue. Dhanya Lakshmi is the Lakshmi of grain and harvest, the food that sustains a household. Dhairya Lakshmi, also called Veera Lakshmi, is the form of courage and of steadiness in hardship. Gaja Lakshmi, bathed by elephants, stands for royal splendour and the wealth of herds. Santana Lakshmi is honoured for children and the continuity of a family line. Vijaya Lakshmi is the form of victory, over rivals and over obstacles in an undertaking. Dhana Lakshmi is wealth in its plainest sense, coins falling from her hand. Aishwarya Lakshmi, whose name comes from ishvara, 'ruler', stands for sovereignty and abundance together. Lakshmi's separate forms are old; grouping exactly these eight as a set of shrines and a sung hymn is a twentieth-century development. No author is named for the mantras.

Old forms, a modern circle of eight

The Sri Suktam, the hymn to Shri among the supplementary verses of the Rigveda, already asks the goddess for cattle, food, gold and offspring, and pictures her announced by the trumpeting of elephants. The image of the goddess on a lotus with two elephants pouring water over her is carved on the railings of the Buddhist site at Bharhut, dated to about 125-100 BCE, and appears on a coin of the Indo-Scythian king Azilises in the first century BCE. What is new is the fixed set of eight. A historian of the Sri Vaishnava tradition has observed that each attribute is found in older literature, but that this particular combination of eight is, as far as can be traced, recent. The idea spread in the twentieth century through a sung hymn and the temples built around it. The best known stands on the shore at Besant Nagar in Chennai: its foundation was laid in January 1974 and it was consecrated on 5 April 1976, with the forms in separate sanctums over four levels. Similar temples have since risen in Hyderabad, the United States and Sydney. The lists themselves still differ. The Chennai temple gives a sanctum to Vidya Lakshmi, the form of learning; other lists, including the one printed on this page, place Aishwarya Lakshmi eighth instead, and some add Saubhagya, Rajya or Vara Lakshmi.

The mantra, in six scripts

Ashtalakshmi Mantra lyrics in full

Eight name mantras, one to each form of Lakshmi, in the order Adi, Dhanya, Dhairya (Veera), Gaja, Santana, Vijaya, Dhana and Aishwarya.

All 8 verses, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, each with its meaning. Choose a script:

The syllable people get wrong

In lakṣmyai, the dative 'to Lakshmi' that ends every name, there is no vowel between the m and the y: it is two syllables, laksh-myai, with the y gliding straight into a diphthong like the English 'eye', not 'lak-shmi-yai' or 'lakshmee-ai'.

When the Ashtalakshmi Mantra is chanted

Weekday. Friday

Questions