Mul Mantar

The '''Mul Mantar''' (Punjabi: ਮੂਲ ਮੰਤਰ, Mūl Maṃtar, pronounced Mool Mantar) is the first composition in the Sikh holy text and Great Living Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib, written in Punjabi. It is a series of affirmations and is the basis of Sikh theology, as well as the fundamental prayer. The Mul Mantar is the first composition of Guru Nanak Dev Ji. The Guru Granth Sahib begins with the Mul Mantar and it occurs more than one hundred times throughout the text where it is placed at the beginning of the particular Shabad. Bhai Mani Singh explains that the reason for placing the Mul Mantar at the beginning of a Shabad is that a Gursikh (Guru's Sikh) should remember that everything else will eventually be annihilated and only the Satnam (All-pervading Supreme Reality) will remain. It can be considered as the moral or the sole truth of the universe. The Mul Mantar is the most widely known part of Sikh scripture but it has posed a challenge to translators.

* The small letters in parentheses are not etymologically part of the word but are included in the Guru Granth Sahib for liturgical recitation.

A Mantar or Mantra is "an empowering formula for repetition". The Mul Mantar is thus the root statement of Sikhism.

The Mul Mantar consists of nouns and adjectives but no verbs or pronouns. In addition, the nouns in the Mul Mantar do not have exact counterparts in European languages and the Gurmukhi script does not distinguish between upper and lower case letters. Thus, it poses a challenge to translators.

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