Panchakshari: Om Namah Shivaya in Practice

Five syllables, how to actually use them

Five syllables. Na, Ma, Shi, Va, Ya. Each syllable holds one element, one face of Shiva, one cosmic act. This lesson walks through what each syllable holds inwardly and shows how a household practitioner uses the mantra. The closing teaching is a grammar lesson: Namah Shivaya is in the dative case. There is no 'I' in the sentence.

The Boy at Kalady

It is early in the eighth century, on the bank of the Periyar river in what is now Kerala. A small village called Kalady sits where the river curves around a low rock. The sun has not yet risen. A widow named Aryamba is watching her son leave the house with a copper pot.

The boy is eight years old. His name is Shankara. He is going to the river to bathe before his morning recitation. His mother has lost her husband. The boy is the only child she has left. She watches him walk to the water in the half-light, his shoulders narrow, the pot bumping against his hip.

What he will say at the river that morning, the tradition tells us, is one short line. He has been saying it every morning since he could speak. His mother taught it to him. Her mother taught it to her. Across the southern country, on the same morning, hundreds of thousands of children are saying the same line at the same hour.

Five syllables. Om Namah Shivaya. I bow to Shiva.

The line is so simple a child can carry it. It is also, the Shaiva tradition insists, the most concentrated single sentence in the spiritual vocabulary of Bharat. What follows is a slow walk through what these five syllables actually contain, and how a household practitioner is meant to use them.

Where the Mantra Sits in the Veda

Long before Shankara was born, the line was already old. The mantra is called the Panchakshari, the five-syllable mantra, from pancha (five) and akshara (syllable, indestructible sound). Its formal source is the Shri Rudram, the great hymn to Shiva preserved in the Krishna Yajur Veda. Tradition treats the placement of Namah Shivaya as deliberate. It sits, the priests will tell you, at the literal centre of the Shri Rudram, the way the linga sits at the centre of a temple.