The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1746 page)

 
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Omega point
:

see
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
;
PROCESS THEOLOGY
.

 
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O-mei, Mount
:

see
SAMANTABHADRA
.

 
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(Heb., ‘sheaf’). An offering brought to the
Temple
on 16 Nisan in the Jewish religion. By extension ‘Omer’ became the name of the period between
Passover
and
Shavu‘ot
. Traditionally the days of the omer are ones of semimourning which is associated with a plague that struck the disciples of R.
Akiva
(
B. Yev
. 62b). Lag Ba-Omer is celebrated on the thirty-third day, but the origins of this minor festival are obscure.

 
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see
AMIDA
.

 
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(Tib. pron.:
Om ma
i pehme hung
). The
mantra
of
Avalokite
vara
(Tib., Chenrezig). In spite of being the most well-known and commonly recited mantra of Tibet, where it is to be found inscribed everywhere, from homes to mountain passes and roadside rocks, it has been greatly misunderstood. Usual translations, such as ‘Oh, the jewel is in the lotus’ or ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus’, are misconceived.
O
and hum are invocation syllables which require no translation;
ma
i
(‘jewel’) is not a word but a stem, and therefore joins
padme
(‘lotus’) to make a single word,
ma
ipadme
(‘jewel-lotus’) which is feminine and locative. This suggests a female deity being invoked, called Ma
ipadm
, the problem being that no such deity is recorded anywhere. The usual translations may have no linguistic accuracy but they do closely express through the separation of the words jewel (male, form) and lotus (female, emptiness) a sense of the symbolism of opposites at the heart of manifestation in
Mah
y
na
Buddhism. The possibility of the present form of the mantra being a corruption of its original Sanskrit cannot be dismissed.