Another huge landscape mantra

Om Mani Padme Hum
Originally uploaded by sashapo

Now that I'm looking I'm finding many of these. This one in Tuva claims to be the "biggest in the world" at 120m high. Can't see it on Google maps.

Landscape Mantra

I stumbled on this recently. A mantra marked out in Tibetan letters on the side of a hill near the town of Zhongdian in Yunan Province, China. The letters look to be 10-20 metres tall.

The mantra is Manñjuśrī's

oṃ aḥ ra pa tsa na dhīḥ


The Chinese text is 松赞林寺 which apparently translates as "Sumtseling Monastery". Nearby is an Avalokiteśvara mantra.

Earlier I posted another Google map of the Avalokiteśvara mantra carved into a frozen lake.

Calligraphy Requests

I often get requests for calligraphy of names or words. Here is "Devi Tārā" in the Tibetan dbu-can script which I did for Sandra.

Errors and Oṃ vs Auṃ

While I do my very best to get things right on this site - I want it to be authoritative - occasionally I make errors of spelling in mantras. I recently discovered a real howler in the short Vajrayoginī mantra! (leaving off vowel markers in Tibetan). I have now corrected this. Apologies is this caused confusion.

I also took the time to change the Devanāgarī oṃ from this one - ॐ - to this - ओं. This is more than cosmetic since the ॐ is actually transliterated as auṃ rather than oṃ. The former is the long vowel the latter is short. (See also below). I use a web transliteration tool to create Devanāgarī text for the site and this was tuned to create ॐ even when I wrote oṃ, but I've now found a work around which is to use the Hindi version. Now that I've done this on one page I've realised that I need to make it more clear on the oṃ page! Which is an example of the law of unintended consequences I suppose.