Book

Om Mani Padme Hum: The Sound of Silence

In December 1987 Osho began a discourse series on the most famous mantra in Tibetan Buddhism, and this book collects those talks complete. His starting claim is characteristically inverse: the sound of silence is not produced by repetition but overheard, and the mantra's meaning, the diamond in the lotus, names the moment when the lake of consciousness grows still enough for its own music to arise. From there the talks circle the great subjects of his late style: the six outer senses and their hidden inner counterparts, the stories of Tibetan mystics like Marpa whose bodies were heard humming at death, the difference between the real OM and its repetition, and the whole question of what silence actually is. As always in the English discourse series, the teaching unfolds through questions put by disciples at the Gautam the Buddha Auditorium, carrying Osho from the mantra into Zen and Sufi stories, psychology, the traps of borrowed belief and the direct experience he keeps pointing at. The full series runs December 7, 1987 to January 17, 1988. A document of the mantra read through a modern mystic's ear, for listeners rather than chanters.

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