Almagest

The library · The mantras

The mantra of Surya, the Sun

the name mantra and the Navagraha Stotram verse for Surya, the Sun

What the tradition reads

The Vedic tradition gives Surya, the Sun, the name mantra Om Suryaya Namah, recited on Sunday, the day the same tradition assigns to the Sun exactly as the Western system does. Alongside the plain name mantra, the Navagraha Stotram attributed to the sage Vyasa gives Surya a fuller verse: Japakusuma sankasham kashyapeyam mahadyutim, tamo'rim sarva papaghnam pranato'smi divakaram, which the tradition renders in plain language as a bow to the maker of day, red as the hibiscus flower, son of the sage Kashyapa, of great splendour, enemy of darkness and destroyer of all sin. The tradition reads the verse and the mantra as two registers of the same address, the mantra a short, repeatable call and the verse a fuller praise recited once before the mantra begins, and treats both as suited to whoever stands in a Sun dasha, whose lagna lord is the Sun, or who simply wishes to strengthen the vitality, authority and plain visibility the tradition reads Surya as governing. Jyotish upaya, the remedial tradition, pairs the mantra with charity of wheat, jaggery, copper or red cloth given on a Sunday, and, where a jyotishi has examined the whole chart, a ruby worn on the ring finger for a trial period. The tradition's own manner of recitation is fixed: one hundred and eight repetitions on a mala of that many beads, the thumb drawing each bead toward the body in turn and never crossing over the head bead at the top of the strand.

The story

The Navagraha Stotram, the hymn to the nine seizers of Vedic astrology, is traditionally attributed to Vyasa, the sage credited in Hindu tradition with compiling the Mahabharata and arranging the Vedas themselves, though as with much of the stotra literature the actual date of composition and the certainty of that attribution are questions scholarship treats with more caution than popular devotion does. Surya's own verse addresses him as son of Kashyapa, one of the seven great sages of Hindu cosmology, from whom, in the wider mythology, a great many of the gods and demons are said to descend; the epithet enemy of darkness gives the verse its plainest and oldest astronomical fact wrapped in devotional language, since the Sun's rising is, before it is anything else, the daily defeat of night. The stotram is recited across India today in temple worship, in the daily prayers of those observing a difficult Sun in their own chart, and in the wider Navagraha shanti ceremonies performed to pacify all nine grahas together, a practice Wikipedia's summary of the Navagraha system describes as still commonly performed at dedicated planetary shrines. The verse used here has been checked against the version given at onlinejyotish.com, one of the standard modern repositories of the stotra literature.

Written from

Corpus key mantra:Sun.