Chandra Mantra

Who Chandra is

Chandra is the lunar deity, known in the Vedic hymns also as Soma, who governs the night sky and the visible rhythm of waxing and waning. The Rigveda praises him both as the purified plant of the sacrifice and as the moon who moves among the nakshatras. Puranic accounts make him the son of the sage Atri and Anasuya, while another strand describes him rising from the ocean of milk at the time of its churning. He is consort to the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha who become the lunar mansions, and through Tara he is father of Budha. Images show him pale, two-armed, holding a club and a lotus, standing upon a chariot drawn by ten white horses or by an antelope. In the weekly cycle he is the deity of Monday; in the subtle body of yogic and Ayurvedic description he is the cool, preserving principle set opposite the heat of Surya.

The Curse of Daksha

The Matsya Purana and the Vishnu Purana recount that Chandra married the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha Prajapati, each of whom is identified with one of the nakshatras. Although he had accepted them all with equal vow, he showed open preference for Rohini alone. The remaining sisters carried their grievance to their father. Daksha warned Chandra more than once; when the partiality continued he laid a curse that the moon should waste away to nothing. As the light of Chandra diminished and the herbs and tides that depend upon him began to fail, the gods sought a mitigation. The curse was altered so that the wasting would not be final: one half of each month the moon would wane, the other half it would wax again. The story supplies the mythic account of the lunar phases and fixes Chandra as a deity whose radiance is inherently periodic rather than constant. Later medical and yogic texts draw on the same cycle when they speak of the movement of cooling nectar and the alternating dominance of lunar and solar currents within the body.

The mantra, in six scripts

The seed mantra, and the form most devotees chant daily. No initiation is required — it is open to anyone, including a parent chanting for a child.

Aim is the mantra, in a sense. The rest is address and salutation; the seed syllable carries the goddess. Where a practitioner has been given a very short practice, it is often Aim alone.

The syllable people get wrong

The conjunct ndr inside candrāya is the habitual snare. Speakers insert a light vowel between n and d, producing “can-dra” with an extra beat, or they flatten the whole cluster into a soft “andra.” The nasal must close directly into the voiced dental without pause, keeping the name to its proper three syllables.

When Chandra is chanted

Festival. Sharad Purnima

Questions