See also:Heart Sutra
Bibliography
Imaeda, Yoshro. “Note préliminaire sure la formule Omma-
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houang.” In Contributions aux études sur Touen-houang,ed.
Michel Soymié. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 1979.
Kyabje Yonzin Trijang Dorje Chang Losang Yeshe Tenzin Gy-
atso Pal Zangpo. “The Significance of the Six Syllable Mantra
OM MA NI PAD ME HUM.” Tibet Journal7, no. 4 (1982):
3–10.
Lopez, Donald S., Jr. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism
and the West.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Martin, Dan. “On the Origin and Significance of the Prayer
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Studholme, Alexander. The Origins of OmManipadme Hum: A
Study of Karandavyuha Sutra.Albany: State University of
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Verhagen, P. C. “The Mantra ‘Ommani-padme hum’ in an Early
Tibetan Grammatical Treatise.” Journal of the International
Association of Buddhist Studies13, no. 2 (1990): 133–138.ALEXANDERGARDNERORDINATIONOrdination, the ceremony by which men and women
accept the more than two hundred rules of the Bud-
dhist VINAYAand are thus defined as clerics, has been
immensely important throughout the entire Buddhist
tradition, even as its definitions, functions, and
salience have differed over time and space. Ordination
ceremonies are roughly the same for men and women,
except that those for women often include additional
requirements that subordinate NUNSto MONKS. The
ordination of women was completely halted in the
eleventh to the thirteenth centuries in Southeast Asian
Buddhism, and recent efforts to introduce the nun’s
ordination from China and Taiwan have not yet been
widely accepted. In ancient India and medieval Tibet
and East Asia, the emergence of MEDITATIONand eso-
teric (tantric) INITIATIONlineages has reduced the
salience of ordinations. Japanese Buddhism is well
known—even infamous throughout the Buddhist
world—as the only national tradition to have rejected
celibacy and avoidance of intoxicants, a development
that has had some impact on modern Korean and Tai-
wanese Buddhism as well.
In addition to conventional types of ordination, the
ceremony was sometimes applied (or, more often, the
five PRECEPTSadministered) to gods and spirits as
Buddhism competed with and amalgamated native re-
ligious traditions during its expansion throughout
Asia. In Japan from late medieval times on funerals
for laypeople often included posthumous ordination,
and in modern Southeast Asia the ordination of trees
has been used to protect forests from logging. Given
the diversity of attitudes and approaches, it is not sur-
prising that modern Western Buddhists have gener-
ally interpreted the ordination ritual and the
associated vows abstractly, and only a few Western
Buddhist have undertaken lifetime maintenance of the
full monastic precepts.Description of the ordination ceremony
Entrance into the SAN ̇GHAoccurs in two stages, the
first being the novice’s ordination involving ten pre-
cepts, by which the novice becomes a s ́ramaneraorORDINATION
A trail of “mani” stones bearing sacred inscriptions along a Bud-
dhist pilgrimage route in Kashmir in the Himalayas. © Hulton
Archive by Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.