🙏Prayers & Mantras
Chalisas, mantras, stotras and aartis — the original text, an honest translation, and what each verse actually means.
About Prayers
Nearly every religious tradition independently arrived at the same technology: a fixed set of words, said aloud, on a schedule, often counted. Hindus recite chalisas and mantras, Muslims perform dhikr, Jews daven the liturgy, Christians pray the rosary and the Jesus Prayer, Buddhists chant suttas and paritta. The forms differ enormously and the theologies are not reconcilable, but the mechanics converge to a remarkable degree — because a mind given something to hold behaves differently from a mind left to itself, and because words repeated in company do something that words read silently do not. This section takes those texts seriously as texts: what they say, who wrote them, in what language, and what the words actually mean when you slow down enough to look. It begins with the Hindu corpus — chalisas, mantras, stotras, sahasranamas and aartis — because that is the largest living body of recited devotional literature on earth, and the least well explained in English.
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Hindu
View all 23
Hanuman Chalisa
Tulsidas's 43 Awadhi verses — the most recited poem on earth
Gayatri Mantra
Rigveda 3.62.10 — the oldest prayer still in daily use, word by word
Mahamrityunjaya Mantra
Rigveda 7.59.12 — the verse Hindus reach for in serious illness
Om Jai Jagdish Hare
The most-sung Hindu aarti — written c. 1870, made universal by a film
Sukhkarta Dukhharta
Maharashtra's Ganesh aarti — 17th century, and Ramdas signs it himself
Jai Ambe Gauri
The Navratri aarti — and the fiercest iconography in household worship