The Source of Dr Shen’s Cleansing Mantra
Over the years, I’ve spent more than a few hours trying to get to the bottom of the mantra that Dr Shen taught us for cleansing our bodies after Buqi practice. I’ve shown it to a number of different Buddhist practitioners but never received a satisfactory explanation.
This mantra is transcribed in Dr Shen’s 2002 book Buqi: Information Transmission as:
OM PRA PRA SEMPRA SEMPRA INDINJA NISJOEDANI HA HA ROROTSJANI KAROETSJANI SOWACH*
We are told that this mantra can be used to cleanse your body, and can be recited with patients for mutual benefit. We are also told that the complete mantra should be chanted in one out-breath and the chanting should last at least 10 minutes.
Dr Shen had his own unique pronunciation for a number of mantras. This was, I believe, due to the way mantras were translated between Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. Also, dialectical variations in Tibet and China, the person Dr Shen learned the mantra from, and the manner in which European students chose to transcribe his words. I assume Dr Shen learned the mantra orally and he certainly transmitted it this way, so it is unlikely that there is an exact written copy to refer back to.
Dr Shen often emphasised the importance of not becoming fixated on complex traditional practices and instead going straight to what he considered the heart of the matter. The use of a long out-breath and downward movement created by the ‘ha ha’ sound would, I believe, have been particularly important to him. Therefore, as far as I’m aware, Dr Shen never made any great reference to the source or meaning of this mantra, but if any of his students can add more detail I would be very interested to hear from them.
Many years ago, I discussed the meaning of this mantra with a student of Dr Shen’s who thought that ‘Jani’ and ‘Dani’ perhaps referred to the four different levels of dhyana described in Buddhist texts. If you take ‘Indija Nisjoedani’ and break it down to ‘Indi Jani Sjoe Dani’, you could speculate that ‘indin jani sjoe dani … rorots jani karoets jani’ are references to the four dhyanas.
This discussion opened my eyes to the fact that the mantra could very well have been mis-transcribed. I was, however, never really taken with the explanation, as it didn’t make sense to me for the final pronunciation of ‘Sowach’ (Soha) to be in Tibetan rather than the Sanskrit ‘Svaha’, but the pronunciation of ‘Dhyana’ to be in Sanskrit rather than the Tibetan ‘Samtem’. As we’ll see below the mantra does, in fact, seem to contain a mixture of Sanskrit and Tibetan pronunciations.
Given my assumption that the mantra was in Tibetan, I then worked on a theory that it might be based on the Tibetan pronunciation of Vajrasattva as Dorje Sempa. I theorised that the ‘pra pra sempra sempra’ was a reference to the Tibetan ‘Sempa’ that had been changed through transliteration and transmission.
The 100-Syllable Mantra of Vajrasattva is well known in Tibetan Buddhism as a purification practice which fitted well with the cleansing function of Dr Shen’s mantra. The important ‘ha ha’ element of the cleansing mantra also matches its use in the 100- Syllable Vajrasattva mantra, which I felt was further confirmation that Dr Shen’s cleansing mantra must be some form of Vajrasattva mantra. I shared this idea with a learned Tibetan Buddhist friend who said that it could be correct, but we never took it further than that.
I still wasn’t completely happy with this explanation so recently took another look at it. I decided that this time I would try to reconstruct a Chinese transliteration of the mantra to see if I could match it to any others. I took the first section of the mantra ‘OM PRA PRA SEMPRA SEMPRA’ and reconstructed it as ‘Weng bala bala senbala senbala’ 嗡巴拉巴拉桑巴拉桑巴拉 which lead me to the Chinese transliteration of a Sanskrit mantra used in the Tibetan Nyingma sect and known in Chinese as the Jiashi yinshi tuoluoni 加持飲食陀羅尼 (Food Blessing Dharani) or the Bian shi zhou 变食咒 (Food Transformation Mantra) which reads:
那嘛,萨尔瓦 打他噶大 啊瓦咯克迪,嗡,巴拉巴拉,桑巴拉桑巴拉 吽.
Nama` Sarva tathagata-avalokite Om, bhara bhara sam-bhara sam-bhara hom.
I also found the transliteration of another sanskrit mantra used in the Tibetan Nyingma tradition known as the Jiabei zhou 加倍咒 (Redoubling Mantra) which reads:
嗡桑巴RA 桑巴RA 布玛纳萨RA 嘛哈奘巴巴吽啪的梭哈.
After finding this transliteration of ‘bhara bhara sam-bhara sam-bhara’ I looked for other mantras that use this sound and here I found the Mantra of Bodhisattva Mahapratisara:
OM BHARA BHARA SAMBHARA SAMBHARA INDRIYA VISUDHANI HUM HUM RURU CALE SVAHA
According to the Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia the Maha-vairocana Sutra states that, “the moment a person hears this Mantra, his past sins will be relieved, and if the person constantly recites it, know that he will be indestructible. Fire cannot burn him, blades cannot cut him and poison cannot hurt him.” Thus, there is clearly a traditional emphasis on the great benefits of this mantra that somewhat matches Dr Shen’s use of the mantra for healing. Gergely Hidas writes that in Sanskrit this mantra is titled The Mahapratisara-upahrdayavidya and he translates it as ‘om provide, provide, support, support, O Purifier of the Abilities, hum hum ruru cale svaha.’
Allowing for changes in pronunciation, the section ‘om bhara bhara sambhara sambhara indriya visudhani’ is, I believe, an almost exact match for ‘om pra pra sempra sempra indinja nisjoudani’ in Dr Shen’s cleansing mantra. The final sections would appear to diverge, but there still appears to be some connection between ‘ruru’ and ‘cale’ in the Mantra of Bodhisattva Mahapratisara and ‘roro’ and ‘karoe’ in the cleansing mantra. It should be noted again that the cleansing mantra ends with the Tibetan pronunciation of Soha (sowach) rather than the Sanskrit Svaha so there does, in fact, appear to be a mixture of languages here.
I’m not an expert in traditional Sanskrit or Tibetan mantras so I leave it up to the reader to decide which one of the above explanations they find most satisfying. As mentioned, Dr Shen did not emphasise the history or subject of this mantra and perhaps would have dismissed my attempts to root out its source. The practice and fruit of the mantra were, I believe, of much more interest to him. As my learned Tibetan Buddhist friend pointed out to me, to get to know the mantra you need to recite it and see what happens. I highly recommend giving it a go!
*Note on Pronunciation:
Sofie-Ann Bracke has pointed out that the published version of the cleansing mantra is a Dutch phonetic spelling, and she has shared a transliteration that English speakers may find easier to follow:
OM PRA PRA SEMPRA SEMPRA INDINYA NISHOUDANI HA HA ROROTCHANI KAROUTCHANI SOWAH
Sofie-Ann explains that ‘j’ in Dutch is pronounced like the ‘y’ in English, and ‘oe’ in Dutch is ‘ou’ in English. She writes that Dr Shen always taught the last word ‘sowah’ with the ‘h’ sound at the end. In Dutch this would be written ‘ch’, as in the published version, but this is a sound we probably don’t have in English. She feels that an ‘h’ sound is closest to the way she heard Dr Shen pronounce it.
References:
https://tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php/Bodhisattva_Maha-pratisara
