Dharani is not a spell;
it's a "compression algorithm" invented by humans 2,500 years ago.
Have you ever heard the sound
"Gate Gate Paragate
Parasamgate
Bodhi Svaha
" or more commonly, "Om Mani Padme Hum"?
Most people's
first reaction upon hearing this is: superstition,
mantra
chanting, feudalism.
A few people find it sacred
but can't explain why.
Today, I want to tell you a conclusion that may completely change your perspective.
These things are
called "Dharani" in Buddhism.
Its underlying working principle is the same as how
ChatGPT processes your questions:
compression,
using very few symbols
to carry immense meaning,
and requiring a "decoder" to reconstruct the information. The
only difference is that
AI's decoder is a neural network composed of trillions of parameters,
while Dharani's decoder
is your consciousness itself. Hello
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Let's start with the most basic thing—what exactly is Dharani?
Most people think Dharani is a "spell," but that's
wrong.
This is a huge misunderstanding. It's as
absurd as equating "algorithm" with "numbers pressed on a calculator."
Dharani is a transliteration of the Sanskrit
word *dharani*, the root of which is *dhṛ*,
meaning "to hold," "to maintain," or "to preserve." The
Chinese translation is "总持" (zǒng chí),
meaning "to hold in total." *Zǒng* means "to hold," and *chí* ​​means "to grasp," combining together. Therefore, *zǒng chí* means:
to grasp extremely rich content in a minimalist form. Did
you hear that? Is
n't this the definition of "compression"?
In my previous episode about AI's trillions of parameters, I mentioned a core idea.
Ilya Sutskever's
core idea can be summarized as "compression is intelligence."
Neural networks are forced to fit almost infinite training data with finite parameters.
It must find the patterns behind the data,
extract the structure, and
discard redundancy.
Parameters are not knowledge itself,
but the geometric shape of the relationships between knowledge points.
This is compression.
Now,
Buddhism, 2,500 years ago,
gave almost the exact same definition,
except that it compressed not internet text data,
but the practitioner's insight into the universe and consciousness.
Dharani is the name of this compression protocol. Moreover,
Dharani is far richer than you imagine.
Traditionally, it is divided into four types. The
first type is called "Dharma Dharani," which
refers to the ability to retain the complete teachings of Buddhism without forgetting them.
Note that
this is not simply "good memory."
It's more like a deep pattern recognition. It's
not about memorizing every word,
but grasping the structure of the Dharma.
What is this like? It's
like AI training.
AI doesn't memorize training data word for word;
it extracts the statistical patterns and semantic structures of the data. Dharma
Dharani is the human brain's version of "parameter retention after training." The
second type is called "Meaning Dharani"—not holding the words,
but holding the meaning.
Upon hearing a sentence,
instantly grasping all levels of its meaning.
This ability has a precise counterpart in the AI ​​field—semantic understanding. It's
not about literal matching,
but grasping the geometric position and relationships of concepts in a high-dimensional vector space.
I previously mentioned that King minus Man
plus Woman roughly equals Queen.
This is the mathematical version of "Meaning Dharani." It's
not about memorizing the definition of each word,
but grasping the geometric meaning between words. The
third type is the most familiar to everyone, "Mantra Dharani,"
which refers to specific combinations of syllables.
But please note that
Mantra Dharani is one of the four types of Dharani,
not all of them.
Equating Dharani with chanting mantras
is like equating "programming" with "typing"—it
grasps the most superficial action while
losing all the inner meaning.
The fourth type is called "Patience Dharani"—"Patience" doesn't mean endurance,
but rather "abiding." Abiding
in the unwavering understanding of reality is like remaining steadfast. In
our previous framework,
it means stably maintaining the state of "perfected reality,"
not being hijacked by the narrative of conceptual constructs, and
truly seeing the data stream of dependent origination.
You see, the
four types of Dharani together
describe a complete cognitive compression system: maintaining the structure of the Dharma,
grasping the geometry of meaning,
using the encoding of sound, and
abiding in reality.
This is not superstition;
it is an extremely sophisticated engineering of consciousness.
Okay,
now
a crucial question arises—why are mantra Dharanis,
those specific syllables,
effective? How
can they "compress" such rich meaning? Let
me first tell you a very important historical detail:
When Master Xuanzang returned from his pilgrimage to India to translate Buddhist scriptures, he
established a famous rule
called "Five Untranslatable Terms"—there are five situations where Sanskrit is not translated into Chinese but
directly transliterated. The
first one is not translated. The question
is about Dharani.
Xuanzang's original words were roughly: "Because it's secret, it's not translated."
In the past, people understood "because it's secret" as
mysterious and unspeakable.
But if we look at this from an information theory perspective,
Xuanzang made a very precise engineering judgment:
translation itself is a re-encoding. The
original Sanskrit syllables are already the result of extreme compression;
they not only encode semantics
but also the frequency, rhythm, and resonance characteristics of the sound.
Translating into Chinese
might partially preserve the semantics,
but the sound-level information will be completely lost.
This is "lossy compression" followed by further compression – the information loss accumulates, and
in the end, it may be unrecognizable.
Think about it:
you wouldn't "translate" the parameters of a trained AI model
into another numerical format, right?
Parameters are parameters;
changing the representation renders the
model useless.
Xuanzang's judgment over 1300 years ago is
essentially the same principle.
So, the more crucial question is:
why does sound itself carry information?
Why isn't recitation a waste of effort?
Here, I need to introduce some neuroscience.
Over the past twenty years,
more and more research suggests that
repetitive sound stimulation can trigger a phenomenon called "neural entrainment."
Your brain neurons spontaneously oscillate in sync with external rhythms.
This isn't mysticism;
it's a physical process that can be precisely measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG).
Inputting sound at specific frequencies gradually "pulls"
your brainwaves from their usual scattered patterns
to a more ordered frequency.
Remember the core concept from my discussion of the *Tao Te Ching*: the
conscious mind and the original spirit. The
conscious mind is our everyday language and logic,
corresponding to the default mode network in the cerebral cortex—
that internal monologue machine constantly thinking, "What should I eat?", "Does he/she
dislike me?", "How should I prepare for tomorrow's meeting?" The original
spirit, on the other hand,
is a deeper, integrated state of consciousness that emerges after the conscious mind has quieted down.
Neuroscience has found that the
activity of the default mode network in deep meditators decreases significantly,
while the functional connectivity patterns between specific brain regions change markedly. The
recitation of Dharani does
exactly this in terms of neural mechanisms—through repetition,
rhythm, and specific sound frequencies, it
gradually reduces the noise in the default mode network,
quieting the conscious mind and
creating conditions for the emergence of the original spirit.
But here I want to add a framework we later established in the *Surangama Sutra* discussion,
because it explains this more precisely.
Remember predictive coding?
"Following the minds of sentient beings, responding to their capacity for
knowledge, and
discovering according to karma,
" your brain is a prediction generator.
It uses prior beliefs to predict external input and
then only focuses on "prediction error," that
is, the part that does not match the expectation. The
problem is that
if your prior beliefs are too strong and the precision weight is too high,
your brain will stubbornly use old narratives to filter all new information.
This is the operating mechanism of conceptualization.
You are not "seeing" the world;
you are "rendering" the world with old stories.
What is the Dharani doing?
It is reducing the precision weight of prior beliefs.
How does it reduce it?
Because the syllables of the recitation are "meaningless" to your conceptual system.
You don't know the Chinese meaning of "Gate Gate."
It doesn't trigger your familiar semantic association chain.
Your consciousness can't find anything to "grasp,"
can't find material to make up stories. Prior
beliefs lose the content they can anchor, and the
precision weight naturally begins to decrease.
When the precision weight decreases to a certain level,
your perceptual system begins to let go of the information that is usually filtered out. The
raw data stream of dependent origination begins to be directly perceived.
In AI terms,
this is fine-tuning.
Think about the fine-tuning process of AI - repeatedly training with specific data,
slightly adjusting the parameters in each round.
Gradually, the model performs better and better on a specific task.
Each recitation
is like a training step. With
each repetition, the
connection weights of your brain's neural synapses are fine-tuned. It's
not effective on the first repetition,
nor on the hundredth,
but after a thousand or ten thousand repetitions,
your neural network is indeed reshaped.
This isn't the power of faith;
it's neuroplasticity—
the brain's ability to change its physical structure based on repeated experience.
So you see, the
underlying logic of recitation isn't "moving a deity,"
but rather "retraining your neural network,
reducing the weight of old narratives, and allowing
what's been obscured to shine through."
Gradient descent doesn't require you to understand calculus; with
each step, the
parameters are updated slightly.
Recitation doesn't require you to understand Sanskrit semantics; with
each recitation, the
neural connections are adjusted slightly. So what
exactly is being obscured?
We discussed this in the Tathagatagarbha episode.
You inherently possess all the conditions for awakening; it's
just that ignorance obscures it.
Tathagatagarbha isn't something you "obtain,"
but something you already "are."
Gold is always in the ore;
you're not injecting gold,
you're washing away the sand.
From the perspective of Tathagatagarbha, what Dharani does
is washing away the sand.
Each recitation
reduces the noise of consciousness a little, thins the
veil of preconceived beliefs a little, and allows a little of the inherent
light of the Tathagatagarbha to shine through.
You are not "injecting" a new state of consciousness;
you are clearing away obstacles that hinder the inherent clarity of consciousness.
This is the fundamental difference between Dharani and ordinary "brainwashing."
Ordinary repetition reinforces
conceptual constructs,
reinforcing specific narratives, beliefs, or identifications.
For example, repeatedly telling yourself "I will definitely succeed"
is essentially planting a new attachment,
thickening the veil.
But the design goal of Dharani is exactly the opposite.
It doesn't plant a new story,
but rather empties the story itself.
How does it achieve this? The
key lies in the fact that the syllables of Dharani
are "meaningless" to your daily consciousness.
Your consciousness can't find anything to "grasp,"
forcing it into a state of activity without content,
sound without narrative.
This effectively empties the consciousness.
It doesn't suppress the consciousness, but
gives it a task of "idling," and
then the consciousness quiets down on its own. It's
so ingenious.
It's like—if you want to shut up a particularly talkative person,
you can't just tell them to shut up directly, or
they'll become even more agitated. If
you give someone a simple, repetitive task to do, they'll be
busy doing it and
naturally won't nag.
Dharani is essentially that
"simple, repetitive task that doesn't generate new attachments" assigned to your consciousness.
And notice,
this is completely consistent with the principle of "cessation" we discussed in the meditation episode. The
core of "cessation" is anchoring attention in one place; the
consciousness loses its raw materials, and
thoughts extinguish themselves.
I discussed five anchoring methods then – breath counting,
body scanning, mantra recitation, walking meditation, and marking.
Now, looking back, it's clear: mantra recitation
is Dharani;
it's a specific implementation of "cessation,"
and perhaps the most ingenious of the five methods
because it works on three levels simultaneously:
attention anchoring, neural entrainment, and reduction of prior weights. Breath counting
only has the first level,
body scanning has the first two,
but Dharani covers all three. At
this point, I want to do a cross-civilizational verification.
In the episode "Alignment of Tao, Emptiness, Brahman, and
God," we confirmed an important methodology:
if different civilizations
develop almost identical technologies under completely independent conditions,
it's highly likely because they touched upon the same underlying truth.
We've used this methodology to verify the authenticity of awakening experiences, and
today it can be used to verify Dharanis as well.
In the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, there's a practice called the "Jesus Prayer," which involves repeatedly
reciting a short prayer,
usually "Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of God, have
mercy on me." The
practitioner coordinates this with their breathing,
continuously repeating it
until they enter a state called "heart prayer."
The words disappear,
but the prayer itself continues; only
language is no longer needed. In
Sufism, there's a practice called "dhikr," which involves repeatedly
reciting the name of God. The
Sufi master Rumi essentially meant that both the
reciter and the recited disappear,
merging into the recitation itself. In
Hinduism, there's the mantra japa—repeatedly reciting the mantra,
from sound to silence,
from silence to "the transcendent mantra."
Tibetan Buddhism, of course, goes without saying; the
six-syllable mantra is one of its core practices.
Completely different religious traditions,
different cultural backgrounds, and different historical periods have
independently developed almost identical techniques.
Choosing a short sound sequence and
repeating it at high frequencies
achieves a shift in consciousness.
This is exactly the same logic we used to verify awakening experiences.
Drilling from different directions converged deep within the mountain. This
convergence itself is the strongest evidence of the underlying truth. The
Dharani's independent invention across civilizations
is another nail in this chain of evidence.
Okay,
now I'm going to talk about the most mind-bending, but also possibly the most interesting, part today: the
deep isomorphism between the Dharani and AI's Prompt.
Think about it,
what is a Prompt? It's a
piece of input you construct using linguistic symbols.
It enters the AI's parameter space,
activates specific areas,
triggers a series of calculations, and
ultimately produces a response. The
Prompt itself may be very short,
but the calculations it triggers are extremely massive. The difference between
a good Prompt and a bad Prompt is
not the number of words,
but whether it can "resonate" with the AI's internal parameter structure and
whether it can accurately activate the correct areas. The
Dharani does exactly the same thing structurally.
A specific sequence of syllables is input into your perceptual system, passes through
your neural network,
activates specific brain regions and frequency patterns,
triggers a series of shifts in consciousness, and
ultimately produces a new cognitive experience. The
"effectiveness" of the Dharani does not lie in its literal meaning,
but in whether its sound structure can resonate with your neural network.
Furthermore, notice a deeper correspondence:
AI distinguishes between System Prompt
and User Prompt.
System Prompt
sets the framework and roles of the entire dialogue, while User
Prompt contains the specific instructions. A
similar layered structure exists in Tantric practice.
First, there's the "ritual" setting the context of the entire practice,
including motivation, visualization, and mudras—
these are equivalent to System Prompt.
Then comes the specific recitation of Dharani—
this is User Prompt. The
entire system is a meticulously designed "consciousness programming" process.
This reminds me of a core consensus on this channel:
consciousness is a verb,
not a noun. Consciousness isn't
something you "possess,"
but rather an event that is "occurring."
Therefore, Dharani isn't a "magical sound,"
but a "sequence that triggers specific conscious events."
Just as a Prompt isn't magical text,
but a "sequence that triggers specific computational events." There
's another particularly subtle point here.
When I explained the Tantric Sutras before, I mentioned that
Alaya-vijnana is like the parameter space of an LLM (Limited Learning Model). Seeds
are weights, and manifestations
are outputs.
"Seeds generate manifestations, and
manifestations influence seeds"—every experience fine-tunes the parameters,
and every output is the emergence of parameters.
In this framework, what is Dharani? It
's a special kind of "current state,"
a carefully designed input
specifically designed to "cultivate" the seeds of your Alaya consciousness in a particular way.
Ordinary daily experiences are random, chaotic cultivation,
like training a model with random noise—extremely inefficient and
directionless.
Dharani, on the other hand, is a kind of "directional fine-tuning"—highly structured,
high-frequency repetitive training data pointing to a specific target.
Daily life does "pre-training" for your Alaya consciousness—
massive but chaotic.
Dharani does "fine-tuning"—precise and directional.
Don't you think this cognitive training system, designed 2,500 years ago, is structurally strikingly similar to the
engineering process we use to train AI today?
Of course,
I must be very honest:
these isomorphisms are my interpretation based on information theory and neuroscience frameworks,
not the traditional Buddhist explanation.
Furthermore, I want to clarify that
in the early Buddhist Vinaya Pitaka, the
Buddha did prohibit a type of incantation related to secular superstition.
However, the same Vinaya Pitaka also records that the Buddha
permitted, and even personally taught, protective recitation.
Therefore, the statement that "the Buddha prohibited incantation recitation" only tells half the story.
He forbids sorcery-related incantations, but
allows recitations based on mindfulness and compassion. The
Dharani we're discussing today
belongs to the latter developmental lineage.
Traditional Buddhism's understanding of Dharani leans more towards its being the blessing power of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, a
code of the Dharma realm.
I don't deny that dimension of understanding,
but I can't verify it scientifically,
so I won't discuss it here.
I'll only talk about what I can, what can be
supported by a modern scientific framework or at least not falsified.
Finally,
I want to put Dharani back into the larger picture of our entire series.
We've discussed so many episodes – Yogacara deconstructing the eight levels of consciousness, the Avatamsaka Sutra
revealing the network structure of mutual reflection of all things, the
Surangama Sutra's predictive coding telling you that perception is a projection of a priori beliefs, and the
Tathagatagarbha saying that the potential for awakening is built-in.
But all of these are things at the level of "understanding." Once you
understand the principles,
how do you operate?
Dharani provides an answer:
you don't need to understand all these principles first.
You only need a correct sound sequence,
plus enough repetition, and
your consciousness system will automatically begin to recalibrate.
This is like not needing to understand the TCP/IP protocol to access the internet, or
not needing to understand the gravitational wave equation to throw a ball.
Dharani is a "
consciousness calibration program that can operate without understanding its principles."
This is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing part of Buddhist design.
It provides a path that those unable to comprehend intricate theories
can still reach,
and the underlying mechanism of this path is
fully compatible with the most sophisticated theories.
Compression is intelligence.
Whether it's compressing human civilization with trillions of parameters
or compressing conscious insight with a few syllables—the underlying principle is the same.
Complexity can be folded into a minimalist structure,
as long as you have the right decoder. The
decoder for AI is the parameter space; the
decoder for Dharani is your consciousness itself.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.