I heard an interesting story about dharani. Dharani (the word must be Sanskrit) is the mantra, which you repeat endlessly until you enter an ecstatic state of non-thinking. To attain this goal the mantra itself should be void of meaning; if not it disturbs your mind and you are distracted into wandering among the same old worldly ideas. Only through the evacuation of your mind by dharani, you reach the state of mind where you can effortlessly memorize all the important verbal teachings.
An old Japanese woman was taught to repeat "abiraunken" which stands for Dainichi Nyorai (Mah avairocana). She remembered the phrase as "abura urou ka" (shall I sell oil?) and the mantra always worked greatly. A monk one day laughed at the woman on hearing her chant, and corrected that it was "abiraunken," an utterly meaningless word in Japanese. She faithfully followed the monk's teaching, and all the power of the mantra was lost.
What should we make of this? Her personal interpretation of the mantra had served perfectly to conceal the meaning, until the logical intervention of the monk made her realize that the phrase should have a "true" meaning. With this suspicion, even without knowing the meaning thereof, she fell from grace.
(J.D. Salinger had a similar sense of things when he wrote the crazy novella Franny, didn't he? )
