Om Mani Padme Hum - Tibet

lindn has added a photo to the pool:

If there's one thing about Tibetan babies, it's that they're awfully cute. As for the grannies and grandads - they are perhaps, even cuter. Without being disrepectful, I find old Tibetan faces amazingly beautiful, with so much character and soul.

Here, a lovely old lady smiles at me, while she recites her Mani mantras, prayer wheel in one hand and 'mala' in the other. After this picture was taken, she directed me to the main temple, and urged me to make my own wishes. If I could make one wish - let me make it world peace, where all beings live with compassion, love, generosity and true happiness.

Matt

From Wikipedia:

O maipadme h (Sanskrit: , IPA: [ mipdme ]) is a mantra particularly associated with the four-armed Shadakshari form of Avalokiteshvara. Mani means the jewel and Padma-the lotus. It is the six syllabled mantra of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara (Tibetan Chenrezig, Chinese Guanyin).

The mantra is especially revered by the devotees of the Dalai Lama, as he is said to be an incarnation of Chenrezig or Avalokiteshvara.

It is commonly carved onto rocks and written on paper which is inserted into prayer wheels, said to increase the mantra's effects. Mantras may be interpreted by practitioners in many ways, or even as mere sequences of sound whose effects lie beyond strict meaning.

The middle part of the mantra, maipadme, is often interpreted as "jewel in the lotus," Sanskrit ma "jewel, gem, cintamani" and the locative of padma "lotus", but according to Donald Lopez it is much more likely that maipadme is in fact a vocative, not a locative, addressing a bodhisattva called maipadma, "Jewel-Lot! us"- an alternate epithet of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. It is preceded by the o syllable and followed by the h syllable, both interjections without linguistic meaning.

Lopez also notes that the majority of Tibetan Buddhist texts have regarded the translation of the mantra as secondary, focusing instead on the correspondence of the six syllables of the mantra to various other groupings of six in the Buddhist tradition. For example, in the Chenrezig Sadhana, Tsangsar Tulku Rinpoche expands upon the mantra's meaning, taking its six syllables to represent the purification of the six realms of existence.