Welcome to our ongoing question and answer series. Today, we have a question from Satya
who lives in Bangalore, India which is now known as Bengaluru. He asks, "My friend has a
son named Om, but he spells it A U M. Please tell me whether or not this is correct?"
I'm glad Satya asked this question because I notice that more and more people are
spelling om incorrectly as A U M, which represent the Sanskrit letters, a u and m.
Even worse, some people pronounce it as aum, which makes me cringe.
They claim that om has three letters, but they don't understand the rules of Sanskrit grammar,
rules that say, om is simply O M. The Sanskrit language has an unusual feature called sandhi that
can cause adjacent letters to merge or combine into a new letter. For example, when a is followed
by a, those two letters combine to form aa. When i is followed by i, they combine to form ii. That's
not too surprising, but when aa is followed by ii, those two letters combine to form e, like when
mahaa, which means great, is followed by iishvara, god, they combine to form the word maheshvara. In
a similar way, when the letter a is followed by u, they combine to form o, like when Katha, the name
of a scripture, is followed by the word Upanishad, they combine to form the word, Kathopanishad.
All this is due to the grammatical rules of sandhi that determine how adjacent letters combine.
According to those rules, the letter a followed by u must combine to form o, they can never remain
side by side. For this reason, to say that om has three letters, a u m is incorrect. By the way,
if you'd like to learn Sanskrit, my assistant has recently begun an on-line course that you can join
using the link in the video description below. It's interesting to consider how this division
of om into three letters came about in the first place. An important Vedantic scripture,
the Mandukya Upanishad, uses om in a symbolic way to describe the three states of experience,
waking, dream, and deep sleep. It does this by grammatically deconstructing o into a and u,
then it symbolically assigns a to the waking state, u to the dream state,
and m to the state of deep sleep. When om is chanted again and again,
its repetition represents the daily cycle of waking, dream, and deep sleep.
Between each two repetitions of om, there's a brief gap of silence in between them. According
to the Mandukya Upanishad, that gap of silence represents pure consciousness. That silence.
So, just as om emerges from silence and then fades back into silence, so too, the waking, dream,
and sleep states arise from pure consciousness and resolve back into that consciousness.
All this is thoroughly explained in my video on Om Meditation, which is also linked below.
This grammatical deconstruction of the letter o into a and u was done for the sake of symbolism,
not for the sake of spelling or pronunciation.
Because the Mandukya Upanishad is so widely studied, many people know
that a, u, and m represent the three states of experience. But if they don't know Sanskrit
grammar, some of them might incorrectly conclude that those three letters actually spell om.
I'd like to share with you a hilarious anecdote told by my guru, Swami Dayananda.
You might know him as an extraordinary teacher of Advaita Vedanta, but very few people know that he
also had a hidden mischievous side. When he was a young man, he went to visit an ashram
in Andhra Pradesh, a state in South India. When he entered the prayer hall, he found the ashram
residents gathered for meditation, and they were chanting aloud in unison, aum, aum, aum.
Not surprisingly, my guru found this very amusing. Later, he went to meet the ashram's manager. While
they were talking, a dog who had been sleeping in the corner of the room got up, then stretched
out its legs and arched its back. While doing this, the dog yawned, making a sound like aum.
Hearing the yawn, Swami Dayananda playfully asked the manager, "Tell me,
did the dog learn this from you, or did you learn it from the dog?"
It's a great story. After hearing it, I don't think any of you will ever spell or pronounce
om incorrectly. Om is simply pronounced om. But there's a hidden detail here. Sanskrit vowels
are generally short or long. a and i are short; they're considered to be one unit in duration.
aa and ii are long, as are e and o. All these letters are two units in duration.
But the o of om is prolated, that means it's extra long, it is three units in duration.
So, om is properly pronounced with an extra long o, om. This prolated o is sometimes
indicated in writing. Let me show you. The om at the top is the Sanskrit symbol
that's used most frequently. The second om is formed from the individual letters o and m. The
fourth om includes the numeral three in between o and m, to indicate that o is three units long.
The third om is written in the Tibetan script and is used in the well-known mantra, om mani padme
hum. The final om is written in Tamil, an ancient and highly revered language of South India.
So, you can write om in any of these ways, but never as A U M.
If you'd like to submit a question for a future video like this one, please send it to me at
the email address shown at the end. Be sure to indicate Video Question in the subject line.