Gayatri mantra

“If you were to ask the average person in a western street to name the most oft-repeated prayer in the world, the chances are that the answer would be the Lord’s Prayer. But that answer would almost certainly be wrong. While there can be no accurately measurable statistics on such a subject (after all, who knows what prayers the faithful use in their private devotions) the general consensus seems to be that the most frequently repeated prayer in the world is the Gayatri mantra.
Many - perhaps most - yogis have at least vaguely heard of the Gayatri mantra. Several will have heard it chanted or sung on CD or in class without realising exactly what they were listening to. Fewer perhaps actually know where the Gayatri Mantra comes from, what it means, and what its significance is to modern Yoga practitioners.
Perhaps the first question for anyone who knows the mantra in its original Sanskrit is ‘why is it called Gayatri?’. The word Gayatri appears nowhere in the mantra itself nor does a search of a Sanskrit dictionary give us much help. In fact ‘Gayatri’ is the name of the poetic metre in which the mantra was originally composed - three lines, each of eight syllables. At least in theory, any mantra made up of three lines of eight syllables is a ‘gayatri’ mantra. But, of course, only one of them is THE Gayatri Mantra. ‘Gayatri’, however, can also mean ‘she who protects the singer’: in other words, Gayatri is also a name of the Divine Mother, and the mantra itself is sometimes referred to as ‘the mother of the Vedas’.
The origins of the Gayatri Mantra go back to what is almost certainly the oldest extant sacred text in any tradition, the Rig Veda. Exactly how old the Rig Veda is has been a matter of academic speculation and theorising for decades or even centuries. Many factors make attempting a precise dating difficult. The most obvious is that the Vedic tradition in India was (and to an extent still is) an oral tradition. Centuries before the sacred texts of India were ever committed to paper, they were passed on orally by memory from father to son and from teacher to student, a tradition which continues to this day in the Brahmin (priestly) caste. When one considers that the Rig Veda contains 1,028 separate hymns - an English translation can occupy almost 1,000 pages - and was only one of the texts transmitted in this way, the immensity of the achievement comes into perspective...”

Written by Graham Burns, the article continues to discuss the meaning and significance of the Gayatri mantra, and considers why, of all this great prayer continues to form an essential part of devotional practices for so many people, even today. Graham Burns is a London based Yoga teacher who also teaches and mentors students on one of the UK’s leading Yoga teacher training programmes.