Siddhaṃ and Maṅgala = Success and Luck.

As we know, after a certain period Buddhist manuscripts begin with the word siddhaṃ. It is this practice which lead to the script that developed after the Gupta Empire to be called Siddhaṃ or Siddhamātra. In Patañjali's Vyākaraṇamahābhāṣya (Great Commentary on Grammar) composed about 150 BCE, he says explains why this word was emphasised:

maṅgalārtham . māṅgalikaḥ ācāryaḥ mahataḥ śāstraughasya maṅgalārtham siddhaśabdam āditaḥ prayuṅkte . maṅgalādīni hi śāstrāṇi prathante vīrapuruṣakāṇi ca bhavanti āyuṣmatpuruṣakāṇi ca . adhyetāraḥ ca siddhārthāḥ yathā syuḥ iti . (I.6.26 - 7.2)

For the sake of good luck (maṅgala). A superstitious (māṅgalika) teacher begins his great, extensive treatise with the word "siddhaṁ" to bring good luck. For treatises with a lucky beginnings spread (far and wide) and produce men who are heroic (vīra) and long lived (āyusmat). And those who study [that treatise] will accordingly achieve their goals (siddhārtha). 

In a Buddhist context the Buddha is said to have been critical of those who were māṅgalika, but was not beyond making accommodations with the customs of superstitious lay people. See my essay Gesundheit! Making Accommodations with Custom.

Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā 1.1

na svato nāpi parato na 

dvābhyāṃ nāpy ahetutaḥ |

utpannā jātu vidyante 

bhāvāḥ kva cana ke cana ||

Not from self, nor from other, nor from both, or for no reason;

Are any beings found to arise anywhere.

~ 

Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā 1.1

Siddhir astu

Since we have builders in the house and it's hard to concentrate here, I spent part of yesterday rummaging around the Cambridge University Library. I was looking for some articles on the symbols at the beginning of mantras. I plan a full scale blog post on that subject, but it's not ready yet. I did come across several references to this Sanskrit phrase: siddhir astu. Intriguingly when I began to look on the Internet I found it in several places, not only on Buddhist sites, but on Hindu sites as well where it is apparently a Ganeṣa mantra. The phrase, even when used as a mantra, is often incorrectly written as siddhi rastu.

Just to clarify there is no word rastu (in Sanskrit). The word is astu, which is the 3rd person singular imperative of the verb √as 'to be' and means 'may there be, may it be'. This leaves us with siddhir, which we can see is the word siddhiḥ (nominative singular) meaning 'accomplishment, perfection'. It is affected by the sandhi rule that -iḥ followed by a vowel becomes -ir: hence siddhir astu 'may there be perfection'. Note that when we transliterate Sanskrit in Roman script we break the word between the consonant and the vowel. However in Devanāgarī the situation is more confusing because the whole thing is written as one word - the r and a are combined into a single akṣara : सिद्धिरस्तु the syllables being सि द्धि र स्तु (si ddhi ra stu). This is one of the disadvantages of Indic scripts, and part of what makes learning Sanskrit difficult. To read it you have to know the suffixes and sandhi rules very well.

This kind of mistake is quite common amongst Buddhists, i.e. the mistake of seeing a familiar word like siddhi, and breaking there, even when it produces non-sense words like rastu. It seems to have happened in Tibetan readings of the Vajrasattva mantra from the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha as well - as I discuss in my Western Buddhist Review article on the mantra: The Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra. The best example is the phrase sarvakarmasu ca me cittaṃ sreya kuru' and, in all actions make my mind more excellent' being read as sarva karma suca me cittaṃ śreya kuru, thereby obliterating the sense of the words, leaving words without any grammatical relationships, and creating the nonsense word suca. Basically it's what happens when you have a tradition in a language you don't speak.

This does not explain the form found on page 33 of John Stevens' Sacred Calligraphy of the East: siddhāṃrastu (which I have commented on before). But at least we can now see where it comes from. What was written on ancient Sanskrit manuscripts was not siddhāṃastu, or even siddhamastu, but siddhir astu.

siddhirastu

Reference:

Roth, Gustav. (1986) 'Mangala-symbols in Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts and Inscriptions' in Bhattacharya, G (ed.) Deyadharma : Studies in Memory of Dr D. C. Sircar. Sri Satguru Pubs. Delhi, p. 239-250.

Siddhāṃ vs Siddhaṃ

In his book Sacred Calligraphy of the East, John Stevens admits that some of the spellings of Sanskrit may not be "strictly speaking, grammatically correct Sanskrit". On page 33 for instance he notes the story of how the name siddhaṃ came to be attached to the script. The teacher would write siddhaṃ 'perfection' at the top left of the manuscript for the student to copy. It became de rigueur to include this word when copying a manuscript. Stevens suggests that three things might be written: siddhāṃ, siddhaṃrastu, or namaḥ sarvajñāya siddhāṃ.

I think we should be clear that these forms are just wrong, and that a mistake repeated for 1000 years is wrong on a much larger scale. Everything that is faulty with religion is summed up in this idea that we should simply accept something we know to be erroneous because 'that's how we've always done it'. The whole point of retaining the Siddhaṃ script in East Asia was in order to preserve the Sanskrit pronunciation. As Kūkai himself says:

"The mantras, however, are mysterious and each word is profound in meaning. When they are transliterated into Chinese, the original meanings are modified and the long and short vowels are confused. In the end we can get roughly similar sounds but not precisely the same ones. Unless we use Sanskrit, it is hardly possible to differentiate the long and short sounds. The purpose of retaining the source materials, indeed, lies here." - Kūkai. Shōrai mokuroku. Hakeda. Kūkai: Major Works, p.144.

What's more these are elementary mistakes, one's that even with a little Sanskrit anyone can see. So, let's correct them.

Siddhāṃ is wrong because siddhaṃ is a neuter word and the form should be siddhaṃ with a short a. This is precisely the kind of problem with long and short vowels that Kūkai had in mind I think!

siddhaṃ

Siddhāṃrastu is wrong again because of the long ā, but in addition because there is no word 'rastu'. Judging from the translation 'may there be perfection' we can guess that what is intended is the word astu. This is the 3rd personal singular imperative of the verb √as 'to be' and means 'may it be'. Where the ra comes from is a mystery, and it renders the phrase meaningless. The correct form (with sandhi) is siddhamastu.

siddhamastu

Namaḥ sarvajñāya siddhāṃ presents more of a challenge. Steven's translation is 'homage to the all-knowing perfection'. Here sarvajñāya represents a kind of false Sanskrit - it uses the idea that if you just add -ya onto a word it makes it into the dative case indicating 'to' or 'for'. We find this in the homage 'namo buddhāya' for instance, which works OK because Buddha is a masculine noun in -a. But jñā is a feminine noun in -ā, and the dative would be jñāyai. This form is found in the homage to the perfection of wisdom for example: oṃ namo bhagavatyai prajñāpāramatāyai. But in a sense this is beside the point because the word is clearly intended to from a compound with siddhaṃ. 'The all-knowing perfection' would be sarvajñāsiddha - taking it as a karmadhāraya compound. In this case the first element loses it's case endings and only the second element is declined. In this the dative form would be: sarvajñāsiddhāya. So the correct form of this would namaḥ sarvajñāsiddhāya. There is an option sandhi here which would affect the final visarga in namaḥ giving namassarvajñāsiddhāya.

namaḥ sarvajñāsiddhāya

I note btw that Sacred Calligraphy seems to be out-of-print. It is selling on Amazon UK for £30 second-hand and up to £150 new! The RRP is US$32.50 on my copy (about £20). This is outrageous and I can only hope that Shambala Publishing opt to reprint soon!

Mantra Quote

"The mantras, however, are mysterious and each word is profound in meaning. When they are transliterated into Chinese, the original meanings are modified and the long and short vowels are confused. In the end we can get roughly similar sounds but not precisely the same ones. Unless we use Sanskrit, it is hardly possible to differentiate the long and short sounds. The purpose of retaining the source materials, indeed, lies here."

- Kūkai. Shōrai mokuroku in Hakeda. Kūkai: Major Works, p.144

Śraddhā

From my book on Buddhist names:

śraddhā (f.)
m. (in compounds only) śraddha. (Pāli saddhā) “faith, trust, confidence, loyalty” < śrad + dhā ‘to put or place’. Sanskrit śrad is believed to be from the PIE root *√kerd > Latin cred, and so probably allied to Latin credo (cred + do) and English creed, though śrad does not survive as an independent word, except perhaps in the form √hṛd, e.g. hṛdaya 'heart'. The literal meaning, then, is ‘to put one’s heart on’.

I was thinking about how to explain the meaning in Sanskrit:



The text reads: śraddha tatra hṛdaya mama dadhāmi. Faith: there I place my heart. Or perhaps it should be where yatra.

A common question

I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked about one particular bīja or akṣara. In Roman it is: āṃḥ. It seems that one particular version of this has captured the imagination of people browsing the web (see left). I'm not clear where the original came from, but it may be attributable to tattoo artist Andy Shou.

In my opinion this letter is not particularly well done, the lines are somewhat skewed - it is probably a design rather than calligraphy and therefore lacks the proper proportions and the connectedness that comes from a practised hand.

I have some basic info on this figure on my letter 'a' page.

The story is that in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra, one of two centrally important Tantric Texts for the Japanese Shingon School of Buddhism, the four basic variations on the letter a (ie a ā aṃ aḥ) are linked to the four stages of practice: bodhi, carya, saṃbodhi, nirvaṇa. The combined elements of all four letters give the figure in question and represent the culmination of Buddhist practice. It also stands for Mahāvairocana, the Dharmakāya Buddha as he appears in the Garbhadhātu Maṇḍala.

I've done a fresh calligraphy in my current style for this blog entry.

Virtual Vinod

There are only a few people in the world able to spot the mistakes I make and Vinod is one of them! He regularly writes in to point out typos.

I have been using his script converter for a year or so now and find it incredibly useful. Vinod has just upgraded his website and added almost a dozen scripts to his converter. This means that we can input in any 19 Indic scripts (including several versions of Romanisation) and output any of the others.

In addition there are a wealth of other resources - essays, translations and calligraphy.


The main website is here: http://www.virtualvinodh.com/
The script converter is here: http://www.virtualvinodh.com/aksharamukha

evaṃ

Last year Tashi Mannox featured the word evaṃ on his calligraphy blog. His calligraphy is always attractive and adept, but I was fascinated by this particular character. Buddhists will know that one of the identifying marks of a sutta/sūtra is that it begins: evaṃ me sutaṃ/evaṃ mayā śrutaṃ. Tantras also begin with this phrase. The word evaṃ means 'so, thus, in this way'. The phrase is a passive construction, literally "thus / by me / it was heard", and attempts by contemporary scholars to override the Victorian rendering "thus have I heard" have not yet succeeded in dislodging it from the English speaking Buddhist psyche.

However in the Hevajra Tantra (ca. late 8th century) this first word takes on esoteric significance. I think this is largely related to the shape of the Siddhaṃ script letter 'e' which is an inverted triangle which in the Hevajra becomes a yoni symbol - i.e. because it looks like the female pudenda it represents the feminine principle. To my eye vaṃ is not particularly phallic, but it comes to represent the masculine principle. Perhaps the most significant correspondence is that of wisdom and compassion. So evaṃ, by combining the two principles, symbolises the union of opposites which is one of the ways in which the Buddhist goal is conceived of in Tantric Buddhism. This is my understanding, though Tashi has more information on his website.

For some time I have pondered how to represent this in the Siddhaṃ script, and I think I have finally found a way of doing it which is aesthetically pleasing.

image top-left: from the top - evaṃ bīja; evaṃ in Siddhaṃ, Lantsa, Tibetan, Devanāgarī.
image right: evaṃ bīja

Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra

tadyathā

My Jayarava's Rave blog post today is about tadyathā especially in relation to the Heart Sutra mantra.

http://jayarava.blogspot.com/2009/10/tadyatha-in-heart-sutra.html

The Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra

My latest post on Jayarava's Raves is some notes on a translation of the 100 Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra. I also offer some commentary on the words, though I plan to write a longer piece on this. I've also replaced the translation on the Visible Mantra Vajrasattva page.

I worked on this for my book project (still lumbering on) but couldn't wait to share it. The version of the mantra I'm commenting on is the one in the FWBO Puja Book.

On the 12th of Dec I'm running a workshop at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre where we will study the Sanskrit text and then chant the mantra. Book online by visiting the CBC Website.

Happy Halloween - the Vajrasattva mantra is just what you need to keep the ghouls and ghosts away!

oṃ vajrasattvasamayamanupālaya vajrasattvatvenopatiṣṭha dṛḍho me bhava sutoṣyo me bhava supoṣyo me bhava anurakto me bhava sarva siddhiṃ me prayaccha sarvakarmasu ca me cittaṃ śreyaḥ kuru hūṃ ha ha ha ha hoḥ bhagavan sarvatathāgatavajra mā me muñca vajrī bhava mahāsamayasattva āḥ

White Tārā

I've recently updated the notes on the White Tārā mantra in accordance with a new understanding of Sanskrit. Not all ambiguities are able to be resolved, but at least it is now clear what is ambiguous and in what way. I've changed the way I present the variations on the mantra. My previous efforts were too dependent on books, and have again benefited from my Sanskrit studies.

Much remains to be done in this vein, although it is important to recall that mantras are not entirely translatable and that this kind of approach is limited. The White Tārā mantra is somewhat unusual in containing grammatical sensible phrases.

Seed Syllable: Stryi

Sanskrit
Originally uploaded by Woesinger

This seed-syllable often seen carved onto stūpas in Japan is associated with the Karaṇḍamudrā or Casket Seal dhāraṇī. This texts begins:

namastryadhvikānāṁ sarva tathāgatānāṁ
homage to all the Tathāgatas of the three times.

Broken down into syllables for writing this becomes:

na ma strya dhvi kā nāṁ

For more information see the stryi bīja page on visiblemantra.org