Surya Namaskar Mantras

What the Surya Namaskar Mantras is

These are the Surya Namaskar mantras: the twelve short salutations to the Sun that accompany the sun salutation, each one Om, a single name of Surya in the dative, and namah. They are framed by a dhyana verse that does not picture the Sun as a charioteer at all: it asks the reader to hold in mind Narayana, seated on a lotus at the centre of the solar orb, crowned, wearing makara earrings and armlets, golden in form and carrying the conch and discus. The names then move through the Sun's offices in a fixed order. Mitra and Pushan are both Vedic Adityas, the first the friend of all beings and the second the nourisher. Hiranyagarbha is the golden source of the Rig Veda's creation hymn, Savitr is the impeller whose light the Gayatri asks for, and Arka and Bhaskara close the series on light itself. The names are traditional and anonymous; their order is the same in every printed form.

From Madhva's dawn rite to Aundh

The opening verse is older than the salutation it now introduces. It stands as verse 10 of the Sadachara Smriti, the short manual of daily conduct attributed to Madhvacharya, the Dvaita teacher who died around 1317. There it sits inside the morning sandhya: before the Gayatri is recited, the worshipper is told to see Narayana within the Sun's disc, so that the light they address has a form and a name. The same verse is printed in the Yoga Dipika and is quoted in the Shabdakalpadruma, the nineteenth-century Sanskrit lexicon compiled under Radhakanta Deb, which is why it travels through Smarta and Vaishnava households alike. The twelve names have a separate history. Tradition in Maharashtra links salutations to the Sun with the seventeenth-century saint Samarth Ramdas, though no early text spells out what was recited. In the 1920s Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi, ruler of the princely state of Aundh, made the practice widely known through his 1928 book on Surya Namaskars and described it as an existing Marathi custom rather than his own invention. Many popular editions add the seed syllables hram, hrim, hrum, hraim, hraum and hrah before the names; the classical dhyana verse itself carries no Om and reads dhyeyah sada, not dhyayet sada.

The mantra, in six scripts

Surya Namaskar Mantra lyrics in full

The dhyana verse followed by the twelve names of the Sun in their customary order, without the seed syllables some editions add.

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

The syllable people get wrong

In पूष्णे (pūṣṇe), the sixth name, both ṣ and ṇ are retroflex and the ū is long, so it is said in two syllables, poosh-nay, with the tongue curled back through the whole ṣṇ cluster. Saying push-nee, or splitting it into poo-shu-nay, loses the name Pushan altogether.

When the Surya Namaskar Mantras is chanted

Festival. Ratha Saptami (Magha Shukla Saptami)

Questions