A person receiving a mantra is often not told what it means, and in many cases there is nothing to tell, because bija mantras such as hrim, klim and shrim are not sentences and do not translate. This looks, from outside, either like mystification or like a placebo dressed in Sanskrit. The tradition’s own account of what is happening is worth setting out, because it is coherent on its own terms whether or not one accepts it.
The account runs like this. If reality is fundamentally vibratory, then a specific configuration of sound is not a label for something but an instance of it, in the way that a particular frequency is not a description of a note but the note itself. On this view a mantra does not communicate a meaning to a mind that then acts on it; the sound does its work directly, and understanding is neither the mechanism nor a requirement. This is why the texts insist on precision of pronunciation while being relaxed about the practitioner’s comprehension.
There is also a straightforwardly psychological account that the tradition does not resist. Sustained repetition of a fixed sound occupies the verbal machinery of the mind, which otherwise generates continuous commentary, and a sound without semantic content occupies it more completely because there is nothing to think about. Whether that is the whole of it or a side effect is the point of disagreement. The practical instruction described under japa works either way, which is part of why the tradition never needed to settle the question before teaching it.
A syllable that means nothing may be doing more work than a sentence that means something. To see how the repetition is structured, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 21 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
Series I: From the BeginningThe Five KoshasIndexFAQThe Timeline