ॐ श्री राम जय राम

Word by Word

Rama Nama as the Mantra of Kali Yuga

The Hindu tradition holds that different ages have different prescribed paths to the divine. In Satya Yuga, meditation. In Treta Yuga, sacrifice. In Dvapara Yuga, temple worship. In Kali Yuga, the present age, the simple chanting of the divine name. Within that prescription, Rama Nama has a particularly elevated place. Tulsidas, the 16th-century saint whose Ramcharitmanas reshaped North Indian Vaishnavism, devoted an entire chapter, the Bālakāṇḍa's Nāma-Vandanā, to the praise of Rama's name, stating that the name is greater even than Rama himself, because the name reaches everywhere the visible Rama did not personally reach. Samarth Ramdas in 17th-century Maharashtra made this mantra the practice of his entire movement, and through his disciple Shivaji it became woven into the cultural fabric of Marathi resistance and renewal.

How to Chant

About This Mantra

Rama Nama occupies a place in the Indian devotional imagination that no other name quite holds. It is the name a midwife whispers as a child is born and the name a son whispers as his father takes the last breath. It is the name Tulsidas built his Ramcharitmanas around in the 16th century, the name Samarth Ramdas built his entire spiritual movement around in the 17th, the name Mahatma Gandhi held to as his death came in 1948.

The mantra Oṃ Śrī Rām Jaya Rām, and its extended form Śrī Rām Jaya Rām Jaya Jaya Rām, is one of the most chanted formulas in the entire Hindu world. The mantra has a particular textual home in the Rama Tāraka Upanishad, where the title Tāraka is given to it. Tāraka comes from the root tṛ, to cross, and the tradition holds that this mantra carries the chanter across (tāraṇa) the ocean of saṃsāra.

The Yoga Vasishtha, the Adhyatma Ramayana, the Padma Purana, and the Skanda Purana all develop the Rama Nama theology. But it is in the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas that the popular consciousness of Rama Nama in North India was forged. Tulsidas devoted an extended Nāma-Vandanā, Praise of the Name, in the Bālakāṇḍa of the Manas, stating that the Name is greater than Rama himself.

The reasoning is striking: Rama, in his earthly avatar, walked only certain paths and helped certain beings. The Name walks everywhere. The Name reaches the unlettered tribal in the forest as fully as it reaches the brahmin in his ritual hall.

The Name, Tulsidas writes, is therefore Rama's greater form. In Maharashtra a hundred years later, Samarth Ramdas, the spiritual teacher of Chhatrapati Shivaji, built his entire Ramdasi tradition around this mantra. 25 crore times in his lifetime.

His Dasbodh and Manache Shlok continue to be among the most-recited texts in Marathi homes. Through Shivaji and the Maratha resurgence the mantra became part of the cultural fabric of Maharashtra in a way that crossed the boundary between personal sadhana and public civilisational identity. The mantra's structure is unusual among japa mantras in carrying jaya, victory, hail.

Most japa mantras are oriented toward inner surrender. The Rama Taraka uniquely combines surrender and triumphant praise in the same syllables, and this is taken by the bhakti commentators as a particular gift of the mantra: it lifts the heart while bowing the head. Śrī carries its own theological weight.

Śrī is the goddess Lakshmi, who as Sita is Rama's eternal consort. Tulsidas in the Manas refers repeatedly to the inseparability of the divine couple, Sītā-Rām are never named separately when divinity is being invoked, only together. To chant Śrī Rām is therefore to invoke Sita-Rama, the dual presence.

The mantra works at two levels simultaneously. Outwardly it praises the historical Rama, the king of Ayodhya, the keeper of dharma, the husband of Sita, the friend of Hanuman, the avatar of Vishnu. Inwardly it points to the ātmā-rāma, the inner Rama, the bliss (the root ram means to delight, to rest) that resides in one's own self.

The Yoga Vasishtha makes this inner reading explicit. Both readings, the bhakti commentators say, are right. The historical Rama and the inner Rama are not two.

The practice is open. A tulsi mala of one hundred and eight beads. One round in the early morning before the day begins.

Tuesdays and Saturdays, Hanuman's days, are given particular weight, since the tradition holds that Hanuman is the gatekeeper of Rama bhakti and his blessing is what carries the chanter into the inner presence. Rama Navami is the great annual festival, and Vivaha Panchami celebrates the divine couple's wedding. For someone beginning, the rhythm is simple: one round in the morning, perhaps a softer murmur of the mantra through the day when stress arises.

Over months the mantra learns to chant itself. In old age and at the time of death, this is the mantra that has been pressed into the hands of a leaving consciousness across Indian families for centuries. Gandhi's last words, Hey Rām, are not a private utterance.

They are the closing form of a practice he had carried his whole life, and they belong to a long line of Indian elders who have left this world with this name on their lips.

This Mantra in Everyday India

Rama Nama travels through Indian life with a particular pervasiveness. A grandmother in a village in Uttar Pradesh chants Sītā-Rām Sītā-Rām while grinding flour at four in the morning. In a Marathi household, the children begin school with Samarth Ramdas's Manache Shlok, the entire poem built around Rama Nama. In Tamil Nadu, the Tyagaraja kritis in praise of Rama fill the Carnatic music halls during the annual Aradhana. On Rama Navami day the entire Indian subcontinent fills with the mantra, temples from Ayodhya to Bhadrachalam to Ramanathaswamy carry it in continuous chant. In rural India, especially in the Hindi-speaking belt, the mantra carries the load that no other mantra carries, it is what is whispered into the ear of a dying parent, what is chanted at the funeral procession as the body is carried to the cremation ground, and what fills the gap of grief that follows. Mahatma Gandhi's lifelong Rama Nama practice and his final 'Hey Rām' have given the mantra a layer of modern resonance that crosses religious lines, it is now the mantra of Indian moral resilience as much as of devotional surrender. For the diaspora it carries home, Ramnavami celebrations in Houston, New Jersey, and Toronto turn community halls into temporary Ayodhyas, and the same syllables Tulsidas wrote four hundred and fifty years ago rise from those community halls each year.

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