Beej Mantra List

What the Beej Mantra List is

The Beej Mantra List gathers the common bija mantras, the one-syllable seed sounds of tantric worship, with the deity each belongs to and the meaning tradition gives its letters. Mantra 1 is Om, the great seed from which the others are said to arise, glossed from Mandukya Upanishad 1. Mantras 2 to 13 are the twelve seeds that the sixth chapter of the Varada Tantra explains letter by letter, in that chapter's order: Haum for Shiva, Dum for Durga, Krim for Kali, Hrim for Bhuvaneshvari, Shrim for Lakshmi, Aim for Saraswati, Klim the Kama-bija, Hum the armour seed, Gam and Glaum for Ganesha, Kshraum for Narasimha and Strim the Vadhu-bija. Each verse gives every sound a deity or idea, reads the closing dot as the remover of sorrow, and ends by naming whom the seed worships. These are the seed syllables as the tantra explains them; a bija is taken up for japa under a teacher. The nine graha seeds are on the Navagraha Beej Mantras page.

Shiva explains the seeds to the Devi

The Varada Tantra is framed as a conversation in which Shiva answers the Goddess, and its sixth chapter keeps that voice: several verses close with words such as 'this meaning I have told you, Maheshvari, out of love for you', and the Hum verse says the parts of the armour seed were explained because she asked. Its verses on the seeds come down to us through the Pranatoshini, a Bengali compendium of tantric practice assembled by Ramatoshana Bhattacharya in the nineteenth century and printed in Calcutta in 1898. In 1922 John Woodroffe chose these twelve verses for his chapter on bija-mantra in The Garland of Letters, to answer critics who called seed syllables meaningless; he recalls a European scholar who dismissed Om as a clearing of the throat. His account places Om as the first, general vibration at the start of creation, with every other seed a particular sound arising from it, and quotes the Brihad-gandharva Tantra: at the mere utterance of the mantra, the form of the deity arises. Strictly, he notes, a bija is one consonant closed by the nasal dot; Hrim, Krim and Aim are called bijas in a looser, popular sense. In one printing the line about worshipping Kalika sits under Dum rather than Krim; the Sanskrit compendium keeps it with Krim, and Dum closes on Durga.

The mantra, in six scripts

Beej Mantra List lyrics in full

Om, then the twelve seeds of the Varada Tantra's sixth chapter in the chapter's own order, each with its deity and the meaning of its letters.

All 13 verses, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, each with its meaning. Choose a script:

The syllable people get wrong

In ह्रीं (hrīṃ) the h and r form one cluster with no vowel between them, so it is one syllable, 'hreem', never 'ha-reem'; the ī is long, and the closing anusvara ṃ is a nasal hum carried in the nose rather than a full 'm' pressed with the lips.

Questions