Robert: > Use of Mantra... > The Aryan-speakers brought 'Mantra Yoga' to South Asia before 1500 BCE, but 'bija' mantras came much later, after the rise of the bhakti sects. Bija mantras do not occur in the Vedas or in the Brahma Sutra.
At some point, we all are going to have to face the historical facts: the bija mantras used in both Tantric Buddhism and in Hindu Yoga are made-up sounds that are found in any common household, heard around the house every day, or from the sounds found in nature. Bija mantras are NOT revealed or cognized or 'seen' by the monad or by some mythical 'rishi'. All mantric practices stem from the ancient shamnistic practice of Oddiyana, that is, Buddhists of Trans-Himalya, hence to India. The Mantrayna was adopted, with modifications, by the Shiva and Vaishanava sects as Hindu tantricism following the Gupta Age. For example, the bija mantra 'phat' is called the astral 'weapon' bija used as an aggressive mantra from the earliest times. The sound of phat, to the Indian ear, conveys the sensation of explosion. According to Bharati, in Hindi, 'phat' is a very common colloquial household term for 'burst, explode', in both intransitive and transitive use, as in a two wheeled, two-stroke, motorized rickshaw, thus a 'phata phata'! "From this, a causative verb is formed. The motor-cycle rickshaw in Delhi is called 'phat phata' by its drivers; phatki is a fire-cracker. Once a syllable like this has been accepted into esoteric usage, analogous syllables will readily follow, such as a nickname for God, as in Agnihotra, i.e., fire from the root 'hot'. "If the onomatopoetic datum can be linked with part of a meaningful morpheme, a more complex mantra would grow of their combination" (116). Phat: (pronounced 'fot') phoneme; Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit; causative verb? 1. crack! 2. snap! 3. pop! 4. Meaningless sound. 5. gibberish. 6. bija mantra - sometimes referred to as the weapon mantra also, in that it destroys obstacles. Read more: http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/ Works cited: 'The Tantric Tradition' by Swami Ageananda Bharati Rider, 1965
