Mantra
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A mantra or mantram is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words believed by practitioners to have religious, magical or spiritual powers. Some mantras have a syntactic structure and a literal meaning, while others do not.
Mantras written on a rock near Namche Bazaar Nepal
Hare Krishna devotees in Amsterdam carrying a poster with the Hare Krishna Mantra
Japanese Mandala of the Mantra of Light, an important mantra of the Shingon and Kegon sects
A Japanese depiction of the Amida Triad as Seed Syllables (in Siddham Script). Visualizing deities in the form of seed mantras is a common Vajrayana meditation. In Shingon, one of the most common practices is Ajikan (阿字觀), meditating on the mantric syllable A.
Sanskrit
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Sanskrit is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.
Image: Bhagavad Gita 19th century Illustrated Sanskrit Chapter 1.20.21
Image: Sanskrit College 1999 stamp of India
Rigveda (padapatha) manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century. The red horizontal and vertical lines mark low and high pitch changes for chanting.
A 17th-century birch bark manuscript of Pāṇini's grammar treatise from Kashmir