Chanting

Chanting is known in many spiritual traditions, not just in yoga. The goal is not to be a Mastersinger, but to reach a meditative state through focus on the chanting and through regular repetition of the chants.

Chanting also allows a special approach to the texts and the mantras that have been handed down to us through the millenia

Traditionally, in India, all the major texts (the vedas, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and many others) as well as the mantras had to be learnt by heart and passed on orally from generation to generation, before and even after the introduction of scripture (around 250 B.C.) and the art of printing.

Mantra collection

Here, you can find a collection of some of my favorite mantras. Hopefully, you will enjoy them as well:

The first mantra is one of the numerous mantras to Ganesha (often recited in order to ask for support for a new project, thus a fitting start for this collection).

Then you will find the teacher-student mantra,

the opening mantra for Aṣtāṅga Vinyāsa Yoga,

the closing mantra for Aṣtāṅga Vinyāsa Yoga, which is also known as the Maṅgala Mantra,

one of the many mantras to Sarasvati, the goddess of learning, 

one of the mantras to the guru,

one of the many morning mantras for starting the day off in a good way, and

the Pavamāna Mantra, also known as the asato mā mantra.

Over the coming months, I intend to add more mantras.

Support for learning a mantra by heart

For each of the mantras, you shall find a few lines on the origin and the background and transliteration (e.g. the transfer letter by letter of the Devanagari writing into the latin writing, with the help of so-called diacritic characters). If you click on the individual lines, the text in Devanagari (e.g. the main scripture used today to write texts in Sanskrit) and Zoë Slatoff’s translation of the mantra into English will show. You will also for each line find the sound (as best as I am currently able to) in the traditional “call and response” technique. If you intend to learn the mantras, I recommend that you use this initially to have the sounds “diffuse” into your deeper memory. 

Below that, there are two download buttons for PDFs. The first one contains the three versions of the mantra (transliteration, devanagari and English) and maybe some additional information, like help for pronunciation. The second one shows in addition the translation of the individual words and the grammatical construction.

On the right hand side, you can find three ways of chanting the mantra as mp3 files: the first one is just the recitation of text, the other two again follow the traditional “call and response” technique, now for the entire mantra, not just for one line.

The first version of call and response can be helpful to learn the respective text by heart – initially word by word are given and repeated, then the entire line, and finally the entire mantra (or verse, if we are talking about other texts). In the second version, each line is chanted once, and you repeat it.

You are welcome to download the mp3 files. When I learn a new verse or mantra, I switch the mp3 player on endless loop – also here the saying is true “repetition is the mother of learning”.

Without the support of my Sanskrit teacher Zoë Slatoff, this collection would not have been possible. In the English version, I have usually used her translation (with her kind permission) – exceptions are marked.

One more remark: I enjoy chanting, but my pronounciation is far from perfect. On  Zoë’s website, you will find more versions chanted in her voice. There are also of course numerous other websites on chanting and mantras. It must besaid though that in many cases people post chants without sufficient understanding of Sanskrit pronounciation.