22 April 2009

wheel-of-letters


wheel-of-letters
Originally uploaded by jayarava
Someone asked me what the wheel of Sanskrit letters sometimes found in Buddhist visualisations practices would look like. So here's something I knocked up with Word using Devanāgarī.

The inner circle is the vowels, middle is the consonants (including kṣa) and the outer circle is the famous phrase: ye dharmā hetuprabhava hetuṃ teṣaṃ tathāgataḥ hyavadat, teṣaṃ ca yo nirodha - evaṃ vādī mahāśramaṇaḥ. The latter is often included in the visualisation practices. All start at 12 o'clock.

I think however that the vowels and consonants should be going in different directions - so this is just to give you an idea and is not definitive. I plan to do a definitive version in Siddhaṃ at some point.

2 comments:

  1. Hi,

    I wonder, how could you possibly have created this in Word? Surely you mean Photoshop?

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  2. No, I mean Word. I typed it all out in Devanāgarī as a "Word Art" object so it went around in a circle. Lined up the three circles with transparent backgrounds. I think I then saved it as HTML and Word turned the image into a jpg - which is what you're looking at (though it was about 2 years ago so I'm fuzzy on the details).

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