Book Progress

I have just completed rebuilding the book and sent it off to get a proof copy printed. This is such a relief as I was at this stage almost a year ago when the Word file I was working with broke. There will still be quite a lot of proof reading to do - and because of the plethora of scripts this is no mean feat. So far we have: Siddhaṃ, Lantsa/Ranjana, dbu-can, dbu-med, Devanāgarī, Kanji/Hanzi, and Sinhala. Also minor use of Kharoṣṭhī and Brahmī. In addition there are the fun mantras in Klingon and Elvish. In terms of languages there are words in English, Sanskrit, Pāli, Japanese, Chinese, and Tibetan. And to think the Triratna in-house publisher Windhorse Publications turned down this book! Fortunately I have a friend who can read all of the above and I think I can induce him to check everything for me.

Still. Progress is steady now and I expect to see the book through to completion by early 2011.

My while waiting for the proof of Visible Mantra to arrive I plan to put the finishing touches on another little book called 'Nāmapada: a guide to names in the Triratna Buddhist Order' which is a glossary of terms used in our names, with etymologies and cognates from other European languages, and a brief guide to constructing Sanskrit compounds. This is aimed at the Triratna movement obviously.

I finished my Pilgrimage Diary some time back. So Visible Mantra Press is now airworthy and getting ready to fly. If you have a book length project related to mantra and would like to get it published I would be interested to take on such work in the future - I'd like to build up a catalogue of niche publications on mantra, utilising print-on-demand to get around the problem of the smallness of the market.

Photography Exhibition

Cheryl includes images of Tibetan calligraphy (some from Visible Mantra) in her art work. If you are in New York, Oct 7-29 do check it out at the Pratt Manhatten CCPS Gallery! Also see her website www.stockshotstudio.com.

Book Progress

I've started posting images of Lansta script mantras on the Visible Mantra Facebook page as I create them for the book. As I am using a font for them I feel they are not proprietary and I'm happy to just give them away. The book follows the order of the website Mantras page which will give you an idea of where I'm up to.

Breakthrough

I've finally figured out that the CBETA Lantsa font is what has been causing technical difficulties with turning visiblemantra.org into a book. For some reason it breaks the pdf creator and leaves me unable to create the files I need to publish. So I'm now in the process of turning all those mantras and bījas into images.

It's been two years since I made the decision to create the book. Each mantra will have four scripts: Siddhaṃ, Tibetan, Lantsa, and Devanāgarī. I had been using fonts for Lantsa as the calligraphy is too difficult for me. I have created all new calligraphy for it, of much higher quality than what is on the website.

It will take a few months to create all the new images and reconfigure the book. But this is the first progress I've made for some time. There is now a good prospect of getting the book out next year. Once the book is finished I will need to bring the website up to the same standard though I imagine it will be a long process.

In the meantime if you are interested my Pilgrimage Diary is available via Lulu.com.

Missing Websites

The Mật Tông Vietnamese Esoteric Buddhism - website (mattong.wordpress.com) seems to have disappeared which is a shame. Although the main language was Vietnamese there were some very fine examples of Siddhaṃ and Lantsa caligraphy on the site.

Also the SiddhaṃKey site seems to have shrunk to almost nothing as well with only the front page and an image of the word Siddhaṃ left. I never used their Siddhaṃ keyboard as I don't like the CBETA font, but I did find the Lantsa keyboard useful.

cont...

I've been in touch with Khai who created both of these sites and he just says he removed them "for personal reasons". There is a possibility of having new sites so, hopefully

I've uploaded the CBETA Siddham font to my site. You can download it from there. It has some limitations and I don't personally use it, but it would be a shame if it disappeared completely. I note it has been used extensively on the Wikipedia Siddhaṃ page.

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)

New Book

My copy of 梵字必携―書写と解読 has just arrived. I bought it off Ebay which is the first success I've had with that website! (though the cover is much plainer than this Amazon image) The Google translation of the title is: "Sanskrit manual - inscription and decryption". Having seen the monumental Bonji Taikan ( 梵字大鑑) one can see that this is simply a cut down version of that book - more or less identical but less elaborate. This makes it perfect for me as I don't read Japanese anyway and I'm more interested in the pictures of Siddhaṃ characters.

I'd recommend this to the serious student - it has a complete syllabary, lots of conjuncts, some complex bīja, mantras, and a complete Heart Sūtra with a calligraphic commentary showing alternate letter forms.

Aother Siddhaṃ Manuscript of the Heart Sūtra

Vinod alerted me to another Siddhaṃ manuscript of the Heart Sūtra on Wikimedia (a sister site to Wikipedia for uploading out of copyright images). He thinks it may be Sogdian. We don't know much about it as the source simply uploaded it and cannot say much about it's provenance.

The hand is quite rough and inconsistent - not very beautiful. There is a great deal of variability between letters. I'm not sure whether to criticise the wavey lines as they may have been induced by the medium - birchbark does this I think. Reading through the text there are a number of corruptions and omissions. But we should not be surprised by this as it is common. And given that the scribe was a sloppy writer it is not a stretch to think they were a sloppy copyist as well. There is what looks like an explanation of the mantra (perhaps pronunciation instructions?) in another script which I cannot identify at the end.

One of the features of the writing is that the pen is held close to vertical. This gives the syllables a 'blocky' feel with heavy horizontal lines. Another distinctive feature is that words are separated by a dot - this is not quite like the Tibetan tsheg which separates syllables, but not an Indian practice either.

The akṣara heads are simply a horizontal line which is typical of manuscript Siddhaṃ - the elaborate wavy lines on Japanese Siddhaṃ appear to be an Asian innovation.

A long ā diacritic moves diagonally up and and away from the head, rather than either vertically or curving downwards. (see image right)

If you are used to contemporary Asian Siddhaṃ then some of the letter forms might appear unusual. I've cut out some of the interesting akṣara and labelled them. The ca is similar to Tibetan forms (which are more closely related to their progenitors than either Siddhaṃ or Devanāgarī). The ṇa is like nothing I've seen before and I only know it from the context. Ta (here with the ā diacritic) is more like a modern bha, whereas the bha is closer to the Lantsa bha (again I think this is an earlier form preserved). Note that sa and śa are very similar. In fact sa looks like a Devanāgarī bha and śa like a Devanāgarī sa.

I think this text demonstrates how difficult it can be to move from the clean lines and tidy arrangement of contemporary Siddhaṃ calligraphy to the manuscript tradition. I can more or less read this text as long as I have a Sanskrit Heart Sūtra handy to fill in the gaps. But I have seen a lot worse than this!

If anyone has more information about this manuscript - such as where and when it is from then I would love to hear from you.

Note 29.11.12. I have reason to believe that this ms. is the one referred to by Edward Conze in the notes to his critical edition of the Heart Sutra: Conze (1948: 49), and Conze (1967: 154) Ms. Nm/Cg.

Bibliothèque Nationale [de France] 62 no.139. Pelliot Sogdien. 

The text is the same as that published in Benveniste, Émile. Textes sogdiens. 1940; the image file name includes the text "Pel.sogd". I can't find the image or the record for it on the BNF site, so I've written to them for confirmation, but I'm fairly certain.

The ms. dates from ca. 1800, and is written in the Sogdiana form of Siddhaṃ. It was found in Dunhuang by French Sinologist Paul Pelliot in 1910.</