Great Compassion Mantra – Comments

For the history of this mantra, the mantra itself in Chinese, some other comments, and links to sources, see my Great Compassion Mantra Page.

Kuan Yin Temple, Honolulu, has a lot of Chinese commentary in its free literature erack, and I find that most of it is well worth reading. Recently, going through my stuff, I turned up an old commentary on the Great Compassion Mantra that I had scarfed away with long ago, but which had then gotten buried by the process. So, since my reading skills have been honed by so much scripture chanting and stuff, I decided to dig into this, and was delighted by how much I learned in the first five pages.

This particular commentary is completely unattributed, and the language is, um, interesting. It actually reminds me of the Chinese script on a T-shirt I won as a door prize at a Shingon (the Japanese Secret School) Betsuin Bon dance, probably five years ago. The shirt shows a Shingon protector spirit, and the Chinese script purports to be an invocation of that spirit. But the language is such an awkward version of classical Chinese that what I deduced at the time was, “This could only have been writted by the Japanese. No Chinese scholar could have been guilty of it.”

But now here I am, with an entire book written in the same awkward style, and this was undoubtedly the work of a Chinese author. And there’s clearly a link to the Japanese Shingon School! There is a constant use of the Chinese roots for “Shingon” (真言). These roots mean true words, or mantra.

So what I now deduce from all of this is, for one thing, the Great Compassion is far more important than I knew, and that it is undoubtedly in use at one of the two Japanese temples at which I have been invited to dance Obon: Shingon Mission Haleiwa. Since this document is old enough to be unattributed, but not old enough to be written in the elegant classical style of the Tang and Song dynasties, it most probably dates from something like the Ming dynasty, when Buddhism was basically under attack and being driven from the Chinese mainstream by the Central Asian barbarians who had conquered the country.

So what I now deduce from all of this is, for one thing, the Great Compassion is far more important than I knew, and that it is undoubtedly in use at one of the two Japanese temples at which I have been invited to dance Obon: Shingon Mission Haleiwa. Since this document is old enough to be unattribute, but not old enough to be written in the elegant classical style of the Tang and Song dynasties, it most probably dates from something like the Ming dynasty, when Buddhism was sbasically under attack and being driven from the Chinese mainstream by the Central Asian barbarians who had conquered the country.

Anything that has survived from that kind of period must be tremendously robust, and must be of value in other circumstances in which Buddhism is being suppressed, such as contemporary America.

I originally encountered the Great Compassion Mantra at the City of 10,000 Buddhas in northern California in the late ’70’s. I have long ince memorized it, but never really got instructed in how to use it. It turns out that five (5) is the magic number for this mantra. You chant it five times at night (the timing is very important) and then it prevents the scattering of good roots and merit, and prevents the arising of evil influences. So I tried it last night , and it works quite well. Your usual tendencies are still there, but somehow you just never get sucked into them. This is particularly useful in Hawaii, where there are demonic forces which routinely go bananas at 3:30 AM.

There are only two Sanghas that I have heard chant this mantra correctly, and one of them is not Fo Guang Shan. The first was Ven. Xuan Hua’s Sangha at CTTB, Ukiah, CA. (Ven. Xuan Hua was alive at the time). The other is the nuns at Kuan Yin Temple, HOnolulu. This mantra is derived from Sanskrit which is a mantric language in its entirety. If you look at the Sanskrit written script (Devanagari), the most obvious feature is a continuous horizontal line, which indicates continuous voicing in this language of the gods, encoding the continuous vibration of life in the devonic realms, from which this language was given to us. The phonemes of the language, then, are indicated by all of these squiggles above and below the line of the voice. The phonemes do not interfere with the voice stream.

–That is, not unless your mother tongue is some form of Chinese, which is not mantric. If your native language is Chinese, and you’re reading ideographs for which you do not know the meaning — which is the case with this mantra for the Chinese, because the Chinese script is a transliteration, not a translation — then your tendency is to chop off the voice stream at the end of each syllable to make the following initial consonant more clear. Because if you dont’t know what it means, at least you have to get the sound right. RIGHT? And the way you do that is to make the initial consonants as clear as possible, because that is where well over half the phonemic distinctions in this language are, and you accomplish that by chopping the voice so you can start from zero with the next initial consonant, no? Hello? Pious Taiwan Buddhists? This kind of pronunciation simply kills the power of the mantra. Ven. Xuan Hua was Manchurian, and he undoubtedly had some perfectly insufferable Central Asian yogi beat the correct pronunciation into him as a child. I don’t have time to do that, even if you would listen to me.

The more I read the folksy style in this (what I now will call Shingon) commentary, the more it radiates purity in ten directions, and the more it speaks ot me. The author of this was simply not bound by the conventions of either ordinary Chinese Buddhist literature, or ordinary Chinese Buddhist sects. Among other things, he has inverted his POV in exactly the same was as does Li Shan Dan of the contemporary Taiwanese Secret School, “Forshang Buddhism.” This is, in fact, out of the Secret School, which is immanent in the Chinese Mahayana. As Ven. Xuan Hua put it: “There’s no secret, except we just don’t practice hard enough, and with enough sincerity, to understand it.” For example this is a bona fide secret mantra which has been in the clear for thousands of years, but most Chinese can’t even pronounce it right. Those circumstances make it a secret. It’s like Middle Eastern history before the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone that opens the secret teachings in Mahayana Buddhism is our unbreakable focus on the Buddhadharma.

Of Secret Schools, I prefer the broad Mahayana to the Tibetan, because of the Tibetan humbug about lineage empowerments, which is completely subjective with respect to both attainment and Enlightment. There are two sects in the Mahayana that I know about that focus exclusively on the esoteric side: “Forshang Buddhism” (That is horribly hammered romanization) and the Japanese Shingon sect. Of those two, I prefer the Shingon sect because it is more traditional, more tested, more stable, and more beautiful.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping