During the many months that went by while Episode 3 of Season 4 sat in my computer, waiting for final edits, I spotted mantras nearly wherever I went. A few times, I remembered to take a photo for the eventual promised newsletter to accompany the podcast. I saw “mantra” plastered on nearly every kind of product that these days count as “self-care,” “self-help,” or “productivity.”
At a big box bookstore, there was a “monthly mantra desk calendar” that promised “a provoking word to reflect on each month, guiding you mindfully throughout the year.” These were sealed, so I couldn’t check out what provoking words were included. A mantra’s meaningfulness seems important here, which is distantly—very distantly!—related to the concerns of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa that I discuss in the episode. The mantras in this calendar, though, aren’t a reminder to perform certain actions in the precise, required manner. They seem more like brainstorming prompts from the description, with the mandatory buzzword “mindfully” there to ensure the purchase has an aura of, if not spirituality, then some psychological secular equivalent.
Another store, one devoted to organization, sells soy wax candles in small ceramic cups stamped with mantras: “I am confident,” “I am tranquil,” “I am strong.” They’re paired with smells (sandalwood, fig & cinnamon, and rhubarb & rose) and crystals (clear quartz, rose quartz, and red aventurine). The mantra calendar seems more apt for an organizational store that sells the Kon Mari line of decluttering paraphenalia. But presumably, some ritual is implicit here: lighting a candle, saying or reading the statement, and then having a resultant sense of confidence, tranquility, or strength (maybe all simultaneously).
These images are from the United States, and how US-American culture got to this point is a complex story, as is the relationship between concepts like “mantra” and specific uses of mantras in places like yoga studios.
A recent article takes up some of these themes (its title is inspired by a book I recommend on the broader topic of yoga and commercialization, Andrea Jain’s Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture). Neil Dalal’s “Selling Gāyatrī: Questioning cultural appropriation of a Mantra” (institutional access required). Dalal’s recent article takes up the difficult question of how to evaluate contemporary “Spiritual But Not Religious” (SBNR) yoga practitioners’s adoption of the Gāyatrī mantra. He points out:
SBNR theology grafts South Asian religious practices on to American Metaphysical and esoteric worldviews; yet from the time of Swami Vivekananda we also find transnational Hindu gurus grafting American metaphysical ideas onto Hinduism. Many South Asian Hindu agents such as Vivekananda helped export yoga into North America (or their Western disciples imported yoga), including Gāyatrī.
However, modern gurus
are themselves products of an entangled history of Western esotericism, colonialism, and Orientalism, whose mutual influences form an asymmetrical feedback loop. SBNR communities export their versions of yogic spirituality back to India. Indians assimilate these views into Hinduism, authenticate them, and feed them back to Westerners as timeless authentic yoga. This process reconstructs yogic spirituality in modern Hinduism, and creates a self-fulfilling loop of authority and power for SBNR teachers. They gain permission, authority, and authenticity to propagate an SBNR construction of yoga, or Gāyatrī in this case.
Ultimately, Dalal concludes that there are no easy answers to whether there is “cultural appropriation” involved (and just what that amounts to) when yoga practitioners employ the Gāyatrī mantra without traditional initiation, etc. However, for him, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems with the way that mantras like the Gāyatrī have been adopted into SBNR practices without attention to the (living and premodern) communities and traditions which are their origin. These are often epistemic problems:
The issue is not just about essences and purity, or theft and credit, but about erasure of traditions and rendering real Hindus, Indigenous communities, etc. invisible in the process. This broader ecology of issues reveals the limitations of the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’, whose narrowness reduces appropriation to theft of cultural products rather than harm to cultural communities and knowledge systems.
The article is lengthy but fascinating, and it goes beyond simplistic questions like whether a white person can say “namaste” and beyond assumptions that there is a pure, essential origin to these traditional practices and concepts.
For more about mantras in Indian thought, a standby edited volume is Harvey Alper’s Understanding Mantras. It’s out of print, but I understand it may be archived by certain orgs online. A recent book I haven’t read, but whose author has been on Sutras & Stuff (in a two-part interview in Season 1), is Illness and Immortality: : Mantra, Mandala, and Meditation in the Netra Tantra, by Patricia Sauthoff, which focus on tantra, something I didn’t talk about on the podcast. Finally, the topic of mantras is one that falls under “religion” in modern academic categories, but, as the podcast suggests, mantras involve questions about language, memory/philosophy of mind, cause and effect, knowledge, and action. I’ve personally written a paper on Mīmāṃsā theories of ellipsis resolution—how do we fill in the “gaps” in utterances—and they take their starting point from discussion of mantras. So, it’s a topic worth investigating for lots of reasons.