The Indian Buddhist Iconography, Mainly Based on the Sadhanamala and Other Cognate Tantric Texts of Rituals c9.s3.26

c9.s3.26

Thus it can be seen that the Vajrayānists believed that the Mantras were endowed with dynamic power. Their power consisted in the arrangement of the syllables, the purity of which is to be guarded with the greatest care. The Mantra is required to be received with proper ceremonies from a competent preceptor. The Mantra is powerful when it comes from a preceptor who is pure, and has repeated continuously so as to visualize the Mantra person or the deity sacred to the Mantra. The letters of the Mantra can only be dynamized by continual repetition by day and at night until the deity is visualized. When the Mantra becomes powerful the vibrations let loose by the Bodhi mind react on the universal Śūnya which explodes in consequence in the divine form of the deity and appears before his mind sky. According as the calling signal is different in different cases the deity becomes different, and thus its number increases. The deities are nothing but the forms created by the force of word or letter vibrations, and by continuous practice anyone can visualise the deity. The Mantra idea is not only logically correct but also philosophically profound.