Final Cover Design

Well, here is the final cover design for the book. Front and back. The background image is made from layered Mandlebrot set images I made a while back (see more on my Flickr site). The lettering on the front is a garbhadhātu maṇḍala with a, ā, aṃ, aḥ, and āṃḥ, and the Avalokiteśvara mantra in white. The back is part of the Karaṇḍamudrā Dhāraṇī. I'm quite pleased with this, it is striking and communicates something of the content, and the fire of my own passion for the subject.

I still want to check a few little details - for example I need to thank another friend in the acknowledgements that I had overlooked. But the text is basically finished. I hope to be able to announce that it is for sale by the end of next week - but you know if you've been following this thread that everything takes longer than expected! Nearly there.

If anyone is going to be at the Tibetan Calligraphy workshop with Tashi Mannox in London this weekend, then I look forward to meeting you, and I will have a proof copy of the book to look at.

Yig mgo and shad

I noticed this image on Wikipedia this morning under Mongolian writing systems. I've straightened it, cropped it, and saturated the colours to highlight the text. The image combines a number of scripts and helps to illustrate something I've been researching for my book. There are two lines of vertical phags pa script at either end and five lines of horizontal text in the following scripts:

1. Lantsa
2. dbu can
3. soyombo (A Mongolian script based on dbu can)
4. dbu can
5. Classical Mongolian
   

The top line reads : *|| la kṣiṃ ja nya su kha hī paṃ ||
The next line reads: **|| la kṣiṃ dza nya sukha hī paṃ ||

This is not a mantra I'm familiar with, but in any case I was mainly interested to draw attention the the marks I have transcribed as * and ||.


The sign transcribed by * I only know by its Tibetan name yig mgo pronounced 'yimgo'. It is followed by the vertical stroke । in Sanskrit is called daṇḍa 'rod, stick', and in Tibetan shad (pronounced shé), which here is doubled ॥ . In this case the Tibetan yig mgo combines both the standard yig gmo - ༄ - and the 'following' yig mgo - ༅ - to give ༄༅. This and even more ornate forms are often found at the head of texts. The Lantsa yig mgo adds what looks like the long ā diacritic which probably is the same idea.


The latter is simply the double daṇḍa or nyis shad in Tibetan. The daṇḍa is the only form of punctuation regularly used in Sanskrit. In poetry a single daṇḍa marks the end of a line, and a double daṇḍa marks the end of a stanza. In prose it is used more freely where in English we might use commas, semi-colons, dashes, colons, and full-stops.

I'm planning a longer article about these and similar marks for my blog in a couple of weeks, and have more detail in my forthcoming book.

Book Progress

I've just finished the English Proof reading for the Visible Mantra book. I have quite a bit of correcting of Chinese and Tibetan to correct, and some structural work to do. My artist friend tells me he has finished the cover art - though I haven't seen it yet!

Book Progress

I've just received back the proof-read draft of the book from my Tibetan/Chinese expert. There is some work to do on the mantras and Buddha names in those languages, but not a huge amount. I've also been speaking to the artist I commissioned to do the cover art and he tells me that his work is nearly ready. Finally the English proof-reading (the most daunting task) is close to being finished.

I want to do some indexing, though I suspect that most people will find the structure of the book guides how they use it, and the contents pages are quite helpful. The book is now 263 pages of A4 - it's turned into a bit of a monster!

Although I don't have a deadline I'd like the get the book finished for the August 2011 biennial Triratna Order convention (where I hope to sell many copies!). I seem to be on track for this.

Meanwhile I've been piecing together another Visible Mantra project which will bring together various already published work along with some original essays. More on this when everything is in the bag.

ISBNs

My block of International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) numbers arrived today. The publisher prefix for Visible Mantra Press is: 978-0-9566929. This is a global unique identifier and means that Visible Mantra Press has been registered internationally as a publisher. Another milestone for the creation of my publishing empire!

Our first book will be Nāmapada: a guide to names in the Triratna Buddhist Order (ISBN 978-0-9566929-0-0 ) which I am working on in parallel to Visible Mantra (the book) while I wait for my proof copy to arrive and then my proof readers to finish their work. Visible Mantra will be second, and then I'll be considering what to do next. I have a lot of mantra material, but would also love to write something about Kūkai. I would also like to produce an edition of Plato's Cratylus with an introductory essay on sound symbolism (or phonosemantics as it is sometimes called) and the relationship to mantra. There are one or two people I'd like to contact about producing paperback editions of hard to find, or expensive books as well. I need to look into distribution deals and the like, but only once I have something to show people.

While I'm not quite ready to accept submissions, I hope to solicit manuscripts once my own major projects are in print - realistically this will be in 2012.