Many people wonder what the most powerful mantras are. This is a natural question, and I am going to tell you.

I should warn you that these mantras are for those who truly desire power, peace and freedom, and not for those who merely seek a passing wind of improvement that vanishes moments later like a fart on a breeze.

I learned these mantras from the great Tibetan yogi and scholar Khenpo Kunpal*(1862–1943), though they originate with the medieval Kadampa master Tsangpa Gyarey (1161–1211).

Here they are, what are known in Tibet as The Three Fiercest Mantras:

1. “Whatever has to happen, let it happen!”

2. “Whatever the situation is, it’s fine!”

3. “I really don’t need anything!”

In entrusting these mantras to you I have faith that you are not someone who spends their days trying to manipulate external circumstances to perfection like someone attempting to sculpt a chair out of whipping cream, nor are you someone so deranged as to think that every passing feeling of yours, or your emotional and psychological preferences, should be honored by the universe as if you were a tantrum-prone toddler and the cosmos was your helicopter parent.

Rather I am assuming you want the freedom of a bird whose tracks cannot be followed, and the strength of a steroid-addicted weightlifter but manifesting in the open blue sky of the spirit and the warm valleys of the heart, not in the bulging red muscle fibers of your here-today-gone-tomorrow limbs.

These mantras are not nihilistic pablum, however, of the sort that would say “do nothing!”

As Yongey Mingyur Ripoche likes to say, “Letting go is not giving up.” One can, and should, make strenuous efforts in all of the right directions, but once those efforts are made, one should open one’s hand and laugh like a magician who knows there is nothing to worry about because everything that happens is just a passing magical display, or to put it another way one should lay one’s burdens down like a passenger on a train who knows that it is pointless to carry one’s luggage on one’s head.

Use these mantras well.

Khenpo Kunpal is Khenpo Kunzang Palden, who I did not meet in person of course, but whose wonderful book “The Nectar of Manjushri’s Speech” contains these mantras.

Photo by cottonbro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-stainless-steel-bowl-with-food-5416012/