10. What is OM?
Yoga Studies in Five Minutes - Theodora Wildcroft
Finnian M.M. Gerety [+ ]
Brown University
Finnian M.M. Gerety is a historian of Indian religions focusing on sound and mantra. After
earning a PhD. in South Asian Studies from Harvard University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music; he currently teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. Integrating the study of premodern texts with insights from fieldwork in contemporary India, Finn’s research explores how sound has shaped religious doctrines and practices on the subcontinent from the late Bronze Age up through today. His forthcoming book project for Oxford University Press, This Whole World is OM: A History of the Sacred Syllable in Early India, is the first-ever academic monograph on OM, the preeminent mantra and ubiquitous sacred syllable of Indian religions.
Description
Originating as a Sanskrit utterance and symbol some three thousand years ago in Vedic traditions, OM has long been known as the foremost mantra in Hinduism. It is the celebrated sacred syllable of chanting, yoga, and meditation, generally regarded as the totality of knowledge, the cosmic vibration, and the sound of divinity and transcendence.