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.</

Green Tārā Mantra

I've been recording the Tārā mantra for someone recently and took this screen shot. The original is on my Flickr page.

Korean Siddhaṃ

Someone sent in this inscription transcribed from a Korean bell - (14-15th C?) at the Jogye-sa Temple, Seoul. The bell also had It also had 'namo Amitabha' in Chinese on it.

The question is what do these lines say? They are clearly a Brahmi derived script - related to Siddhaṃ or Ranjana. I've come across one or two other similar Korean inscriptions but have yet to find a definitive guide to help me read them.

One useful source is found in: Tatsuon Maruyama. Sanskrit-Japanese dictionary of dharanis: The Darani-jiten (Sata-pitaka series : Indo-Asian literatures) International Academy of Indian Culture, 1981. This has a Korean syllabary (P.48 f) but it is not identical to the kinds of inscriptions I've seen. So I cannot confidently read this inscription. I'll give my guesses but I would very much like to here from anyone who can read this!

The first character in both lines is oṃ. Actually I think this is the only example I have seen of auṃ in a Buddhist inscription. The other characters all look to be single syllables rather than conjuncts which makes it easier.

So line 1 character 1 (1.1) is oṃ. 1.2-4 are repeated at 2.6-8. 1.2 looks most like bha, but I would hold open the possibility of ha. 1.3 looks like ta. 1.4 could be ka, but I think it is na. In some early forms of Siddhaṃ one sees this style of na which was the template for the Tibetan na. This gives us oṃ bha ta na, or ha ta na (with bha ta ka as an outside possibility). My correspondent (who is very familiar with Sanskrit) thought the marks on the top left of some characters are 'e' diacritics. It's a bit inconsistent to be sure. The obviously problem with this reading is that none of the possibilities are Sanskrit or anything like Sanskrit. So I've got it completely wrong, or this is not Sanskrit. Certainly Siddhaṃ is used to write Japanese in contemporary Japan, but usually only as a novelty item.

On line two we begin with oṃ again. 2.2 I read 'na' (as above). 2.3 seems very likely to be va or ba. 2.4 looks like ca. 2.5 offers some possibilities. Ya might be an obvious guess, but going by the Dictionary of Dhāraṇīs I would expect the ya to be more like the Ranjana ya - less rounded. From the same source both pa and gha appear similar. 2.6-8 as I say are as above. Again this is either completely wrong or not Sanskrit.

oṃ bha ta ne
oṃ na va ca pa bha ta na

If anyone can do better than this I would be delighted to hear from you!

My friend Maitiu has written to me about this:

My first thought was that it looked like the Bhujimol script of Nepal. I thought the second syllable (1.2) was a da (if you look at the related modern Bengali script you can see the similarity) but I'm not sure the mantra makes any sense if you do that. The 1.3 looks like a Bhujimol ra and 1.4 looks like an unusual ka. 2.3 looks like a va or ba but 2.4 is ca which suggests vaca. If 2.2 is ka that would give kavaca, armour, war-drum, amulet, especially a charm inscribed with a bīja. Kavaca is a classic piece of Tantric terminology.

2.5 could be a pa or a ya, they're hard to tell apart in Bhujimol, but it looks more like a ya and that would probably make more sense. Going back to 1.2 it doesn't look exactly like a Bhujimol bha but it's close enough to be possible. I'm assuming that the mark on the head bar of this syllable is an e diacritic and then 1.2-3 would give bhera, a kettle-drum, from the root bhī. Bheraka isn't in the dictionary but bhīraka, bhīruka meaning fearful, formidable derived from the same root. Anyway that's my best guess at trying to decipher the mantra. It's a shame we can't see the original. The script doesn't seem to be exactly Siddhaṃ or Bhujimol but another intermediate form of the Eastern Devanagari script.

I've noticed in looking Siddhaṃ mantras in the Taisho Tripitaka that vowels can be shifted inadvertently - perhaps a shift from bhī > bhe may be understandable (I've seen speculation that this might be due to the accents of some of the intermediaries). So the mantras here might also be:

oṃ bheraka
oṃ kavaca bheraka

This is certainly more plausible, though I can't find this mantra or a mantra of which this is a fragment.

---

14.6.10

My informant tells me that there are similar inscriptions on the Yonboksa Bell.

The last Indian Acārya to visit Korea was Chikong (Dhyānabhadra). He arrived in Korea in the 1340s and established the Juniper Rock Monastery on the pattern of the Nalanda University. Its foundations can be seen near Seoul. He wrote Sanskrit dhāraṇī-mantras on the gigantic Yonboksa Bell for the liberation and peace of the Korean People from Mongol dominatio [Lokesh Chandra. 'Interface of India with other Asian Lands.' Dialogue July - September, 2003 , Volume 5 No. - online www.asthabharati.org]

Also in: Robinson, David M. Empire's Twilight: Northeast Asia Under the Mongols (p.122)



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