Jayarava Inteviewed for Buddhist Geeks

A while back I was approached to do an email interview on the subject of Buddhist Calligraphy for the Buddhist Geeks blog. The interview, entitled Mantra, Tantra and the Art of Beautiful Writing has now appeared on the Buddhist Geeks website, which I suppose confirms my status as a Buddhist geek! Hopefully more people will give some thought to taking up this fascinating and beautiful art.

The Master at Work

Tashi Mannox has just posted another YouTube video of himself doing some calligraphy of the letters ཡག་གཟུགས་དམ་པ - yag gzugsa dma pa meaning 'sacred calligraphy'. It's great to be able to watch a really skilled calligrapher at work.

Sacred calligraphy in Sanskrit would be āryakalyāṇalekhā (आर्यकल्याणलेखा) - ārya 'noble, sacred'; kalyāṇa 'beautiful, excellent, noble, auspicious' is cognate with the Greek καλλι (calli-) 'beautiful'; and writing is lekhā, from √likh 'to scratch'.

Uṣnīṣa-vijaya Dhāraṇī

I recently found the online "Annual Report of The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University" and have been working through some of the articles. One which might interest readers of this blog is:

Akira Yuyama 'An Uṣṇīṣa-Vijayā Dhāraṇī Text from Nepal' ARIRIAB. (pdf) p.165-175

As the author points out the manuscript was very poorly copied, but he does reconstruct the text and this gives a complete dhāraṇī which is rather too long to quote here (plus the pdf is an image and not text)