News from Visible Mantra - and an appeal

Visible Mantra is a website dedicated to the calligraphy of Buddhist mantras and seed-syllables. It’s become very popular, with nearly half a million page views last year - and yet Jayarava, its creator has even bigger plans for it. He writes -

“Visible Mantra is part of a bigger plan to create resources for Buddhists who use mantra as part of their practice. My aim is that Visible Mantra will also become a publishing house and will attract manuscripts from authors from a range of traditions on the subject of Buddhist mantra. I also regularly help individuals who want inscriptions transcribed and identified, or calligraphy of mantras (though I seldom do tattoos).

“I hope to bring out the book of the website in 2010 - with high definition images of all the mantras on the site and a few more - and to eventually bring the website up to the same standard: e.g. to have all mantras and bījas in four scripts: Siddham, Devanāgarī, Tibetan (dbu-can) and Lantsa.

“I also have planned a Siddhaṃ primer and have made a start on a history of mantra in Buddhism".

What he needs now is a bit of money to enable him to put in the necessary hours. He says -

“This year I'm asking each person who visits the site for a one off donation of 50p (about US$0.80) to the website. This would provide me with enough income to work on the Visible Mantra project full-time.

“Over the years I've made a trickle of money from Amazon ads (about £50 a year). I'm still waiting to hit the threshold for a Google ads payout. But I've continued to put in as many hours as I could to create this resource and write my blog - sometimes to the detriment of my health”.

Click on the button to donate 50p to Visible Mantra



Jayarava has also made some videos of his work - see for instance him writing the Avalokitesvara Mantra on YouTube -