śūnyatā

sunyata, a photo by jayarava on Flickr.

Got my calligraphy pens out for the first time in ages to do some words for a new internet project.

Dhāraṇī vs Pidgin

"Words from early-stage pidgins consist largely of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with few or no articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns. As for grammar, early-stage pidgin discourse typically consist of short strings of words with little phrase construction, no regularity in word order, no subordinate clauses, and no inflectional endings on words." Jared Diamond. The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanazee p.142. 

 Cf this dhāraṇi from the Saddharmapuṇḍarikā Sūtra:

Anye manye mane mamane citte carite same samita viśānte muke muktame same avishame samasame jaye kṣāye akṣāye akṣaīne śānte samite dhāraṇī ālokabhāshe pratyavekṣāṇi nidhiru abhyan taranivishṇe abhyantarapāriśuddhi utkule mutkule araṭe paraṭe sukāṅkṣaī asamasame buddhavilokite dharmaparīkṣaite saṃghanirghoshaṇi nirghoshanī bhayā-bhayaviśodhani mantre mantrākṣāyate rule rutakauśalye akṣāye akṣāyavanatāye vakkule valoda amanyanatāye svāhā.

Diamond's description of early-stage pidgins is a pretty good description of the strings of words found in dhāraṇīs. Make of that what you will.

Yet Another Heart Sutra Ms.

Click to Embiggen

This is the Heart Sutra manuscript I'm currently working on: Cambridge Ms. No ADD 1680 - part of a large bundle of leaves. It's probably from the 13th century which makes it one of the oldest Heart Sutra ms. still extant. It's written in black ink which is faded in places, on a talipot palm leaf. The writing is one the Nepalese 'hooked' scripts (probably Bhujimol I think).

Unfortunately the first page is missing, but it is still an interesting specimen. It's been very difficult to decipher at times - one has to look for familiar landmarks like 'evaṃ' or 'prajñāpāramitā' and then deduce from there, though in the end I wasn't guessing most of the syllables.

This is not one of the basic mss. that Conze used in his 1948 Critical edition, but he does cite it in the 1967 versions - albeit somewhat speculatively at times. He refers to it as Nk.

Another Heart Sutra

Another Heart Sutra - 20th century, Newāri script. Black in on paper, with red ink decorations. The image in the centre is a four-armed Prajñāpāramitā.

I'll be leading a day of study on the Heart Sutra on 30 Dec at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre. 10-4. All welcome.

Heart Sutra.

ADD 1485 open. Heart Sutra., a photo by jayarava on Flickr.

I spent the day transcribing the Heart Sutra found in this manuscript. There really are more than one Heart Sutra - and more than the long and short text as well. This is a variant on the long text.

Ca. 1677 CE. Gold ink on black. Ranjana script. Approx 24 x 7.6 cm. No title. Contains the Heart Sutra along with other dhāraṇī texts (which is where we mostly find the HS in these ms.s). This ms is unusual in that it expands the contractions we normally associate with the HS.

Mantra of a Living Buddha(?)

Someone recently sent me a picture of a bracelet with a mantra on it, asking if I could translate it. The mantra seemed to transcribe as 

ༀ ཨཱཿ ཧཱུྂ གུ རུ བྷྱཿ ཉ༔ ཨ༔ ཤ༔ ས༔ མ༔ ཧ༔ པཪྨ ས མ སེདྡྷེ ཧཱུྂ 

 oṃ aḥ hūṃ guru bhyaḥ ña a śa sa ma ha parma sa ma siddhi hūṃ 

 There is a difference between ཿ and ༔, the former (visarga) affects the sound, the latter (gter tsheg; treasure mark) seems to be decorative. The syllables decorated with the ༔ are a series of bīja or seed-syllables, some times called a thödröl (thos grol) mantra. The symbol is used with terma (gter ma) or revealed teachings. There is a minor error here ཉ༔ should read འ༔ which would transcribe as 'a. So the sequence in the middle is:

'a a śa sa ma ha

This is sometimes written as a ah sha sa ma ha. Some sources say that this mantra requires a special transmission before it can be used. The mantra seems to be associated with passing through the bardos. 

The word parma might be a Tibetan word, or more likely a corruption of padma པདྨ. The more I look at it the more it seems that padma was what was intended. 

In the word གུ རུ བྷྱཿ (i.e. gurubhyaḥ) the last syllable is badly formed (the top should join up with the vertical stroke on the right), but it must be this. In Sanskrit is the dative plural from of guru, and means 'to or for the gurus'. In Tibetan salutations one sometimes sees 

namo gurubhyaḥ namo buddhāya namo dharmāya namo saṅghāya  

homage to the teachers, homage to the Buddha, homage to the Dharma,
homage to the Saṅgha

So the mantra, with these minor corrections appears to read: 

࿓ༀ་ཨཱཿཧཱུྂ་གུ་རུ་ཉ༔ཨ༔ཤ༔ས༔མ༔ཧ༔པཪྨ་ས་མ་སེདྡྷེ་ཧཱུྂ།

oṃ aḥ hūṃ gurubhyaḥ 'a a śa sa ma ha padma sama siddhi hūṃ 

With this in mind we start to see references to whose mantra this on the internet. It's the mantra of a self proclaimed Living Buddha, by the name of Lian Sheng, the founder of the True Buddha School. He's apparently popular in East Asia, though not uncontroversial. Lian Sheng seems to be a Chinese form of the name Padmasambhava and the mantra employs elements from the Vajra Guru mantra: oṃ aḥ hūṃ vajra guru padma siddhi hūṃ; plus the bardo mantra: 'a a śa sa ma ha. 

Though he is said to be a "Living Buddha" and have 5 million followers I had never heard of him before today. I'd suggest caution in taking him at face value.

48VUPQ3F2G2W 

Sanskrit Manuscripts at Cambridge University

The University of Cambridge embarked on an exercise of 'linguistic archaeology' late last year, launching a project to survey their extensive collection of India and Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts. Most of these are Buddhist. Some 2000 birch-bark, and palm-leaf manuscripts were collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and not all have been properly catalogued. The manuscripts themselves date from as far back to the 9th century - making them amongst the oldest surviving India manuscripts. Because there has previously been no systematic survey of all the texts it is possible that some treasures may lie waiting to be discovered.

The project includes plans to digitise some of the texts and make them available via Cambridge University's Digital Library, which recently added images of Isaac Newton's papers. I think everyone is hoping for a renaissance of Sanskrit studies at Cambridge, and perhaps also for Buddhist studies (CU presently offers no separate courses in Buddhism).

Last Friday I attended an informal talk by visiting scholar Harunaga Isaacson and saw pictures of some of the manuscripts. I felt privileged to be amongst such illustrious scholars (people who are fluent in Sanskrit and the many variations of the scripts). I will try to add updates about the project as it goes.

Image and text borrowed from the University of Cambridge Website. Their account of the project is here: Powerful Words.

New Siddhaṃ Calligrapher

There's a new Buddhist calligrapher on Flickr. Levente Bakos does work in Siddhaṃ (left) and Tibetan scripts. Some beautiful work here, and with a distinctive style of his own. He does seals as well.

Buddhist Sutra Siddham

Buddhist Sutra Siddham, a photo by geraldford on Flickr.

3rd line:

* na maḥ sa rva jñā ya a ryā va lo ki te śva ra bo dhi sa ttva ga mbhī raṃ pra jña
* namaḥ sarvajñāya - homage to the all knowing
aryāvalokiteśvara bodhisattva gambhiraṃ prajña[pāramitā ca]

4th line:

ryāṃ ca ra mā ṇo vya va lo ka ya ti sma paṃ ca ska ndhaḥ tāṃ śca sva bhā va...
[ca]ryāṃ caramāno vyavalokayati sma pañca skandhaḥ tāṃś ca svabhāva [śūnyān paśyati sma]

The Bodisattva Avalokiteśvara coursing in the course of perfect wisdom, beheld the five skandhas and saw them as empty of independent existence.

Pronouncing Anusvāra

The question of how to pronounce anusvāra in syllables like oṃ and hūṃ is a question I get asked quire frequently. There are two answers to this, and I'm not sure it's any longer possible to decide which is right.

Anusvāra means 'after-sound'. It is was originally written, in the Brahmī scrpit as a small dot on the right-hand side of a syllable, but soon migrated to the top as in modern day Devanāgarī: e.g. ta त vs taṃ तं In Roman script we use an m with an underdot ṃ; or some times an overdot ṁ; or an n with a tail in older books: ŋ. There is also the anunāsika 'from the nose' which is a more general word for nasal sounds including consonants like ṅa, ña, ṇa, na and ma, and the nasalised semivowels e.g. lṃ. The anunāsika is indicated with candra-bindu in Devanāgarī: la ल vs lṃ लँ. Note that in modern languages such as Hindi the anusvāra and anunāsika are used interchangeably, but the anunāsika is used with seed-syllables where is adds to the symbolism.

What the anusvāra does when added to a syllable is nasalise the vowel of the syllable. Even though the sound is indicated by an additional letter in Roman script (the modified m) it is only indicating a change in the quality of the vowel sound. When speaking the air coming out of your lungs to make the sounds usually escapes through he mouth where the tongue and mouth shape the sound into distinct units. With a nasal sound, however, some or all of the air escape through the nasal cavity - which changes the timbre of the sound to produce the distinct nasal drone or buzz. You can experiment with the different sounds by pronouncing pairs of sounds that are only different because on is nasal: pa and ma have more or less the same articulation except the ma is nasal. Similarly ka and ṅa, ca and ña, ṭa and ṇa, or ta and na.

Now a vowel is produced with an open vocal tract - one doesn't interrupt the flow of air with the velum, tongue, or lips. Nasalising a vowel sound only requires a lowering of the velum (the soft palate at the rear of the mouth). The sound is used in English as the end of words like sung, sing, sang.

However there is another way to make a nasalised sound which is to bring the lips together at the end of the syllable, forcing all of the out going air through the nose to make a nasal humming sound. This is different from the ma syllable which begins with closed lips that open suddenly to release the built up pressure With the labial anusvāra the lips stay pressed together.

Both of these methods are common, and as far as I know there is no way to decide which is more correct.

So oṃ can be pronounced two different ways: ong and om (with no release at the end). With oṃ the latter is more common, but when one is learning Indic languages one hears a range of pronunciation of nasalised vowels.

Similarly hūṃ is pronounced as both hoong and hoom. The ū sound is a bit like the English vowel sound in 'hoot', but more open (i.e. the lips are not so bunched up). Make the face for hoot and then relax the lips. But please note that accents are all about how you pronounce vowels. You tend not to hear your own accent, so you pronounce vowels quite automatically. So describing how a vowel sound should be pronounced is usually folly at best. For ū the International Phonetic Alphabet sign is /uː/.

So we see oṃ pronounced more usually with the -m sound, and seed syallbles such as tāṃ, or hūṃ with the -ng sound. Take your pick. What most people do is follow the people around them. And then at least we're all doing the same thing, and what is language but a social convention anyway?

The idea of reproducing the "original" pronunciation is probably just a fantasy. Sometimes we can reconstruct pronunciation from rhyming patterns in verse, but the fact is the we just don't know and we never will, because we can't hear the ancient speakers. Pronunciation changes. Modern day Hindi speakers do not pronounce the vowels exactly as Sanskrit would seem to demand either. For instance they flatten the ai vowel so that it sounds like e. So the "original" pronunciation is lost. We must be content to do our best, and produce sounds that seem to fit what is written.

As I showed in my article on the 100 syllable Vajrasattva mantra in the Western Buddhist Review the errors introduced into mantra recitation are sometimes due to mis-reading rather than mis-hearing. So we are not the first to struggle with these issues!