Final Accepted Script Proposal
21-675: The Kutila inscription of Bareilly is an inscription in the Kutila script (कुटिल लिपि) dating to 992 CE that provides crucial evidence in tracing the shared descent of the Devanagari and Bengali-Assamese scripts of Northern and Eastern India from the predecessor Gupta script . The writing was found on a stone unearthed in Bareilly district in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (modern-day Uttar Pradesh ). The inscription proclaims that it
42-433: A brush, as with Chinese writing; it is also written with a bamboo pen. In Japan, a special brush called a bokuhitsu ( 朴筆 , Cantonese: pokbat ) is used for formal Siddhaṃ calligraphy. The informal style is known as "fude" ( 筆 , Cantonese: "moubat") . Siddhaṃ is still largely a hand written script. Some efforts have been made to create computer fonts, though to date none of these are capable of reproducing all of
63-421: Is to serve as a unifying block for all regional variants of the script, such as Siddhamātṛkā and Kuṭila. The Siddham glyphs are based upon Japanese forms of Siddham characters on account of active usage of the script by Japanese Buddhist communities. Kutila script Siddhaṃ (also Siddhāṃ ), also known in its later evolved form as Siddhamātṛkā , is a medieval Brahmic abugida , derived from
84-631: The Siddhaṃ conjunct consonants. Notably, the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Texts Association has created a Siddhaṃ font for their electronic version of the Taisho Tripiṭaka , though this does not contain all possible conjuncts. The software Mojikyo also contains fonts for Siddhaṃ, but split Siddhaṃ in different blocks and requires multiple fonts to render a single document. A Siddhaṃ input system which relies on
105-701: The Gupta script and ancestral to the Nāgarī , Eastern Nagari , Tirhuta , Odia and Nepalese scripts. The word Siddhaṃ means "accomplished" or "perfected" in Sanskrit . The script received its name from the practice of writing Siddhaṃ , or Siddhaṃ astu (may there be perfection), at the head of documents. Other names for the script include bonji ( Japanese : 梵字 ) " Brahma 's characters" and "Sanskrit script" and Chinese : 悉曇文字 ; pinyin : Xītán wénzi "Siddhaṃ script". The Siddham script evolved from
126-495: The Chinese Buddhist canon preserves the Siddhaṃ characters for most mantras, and Korean Buddhists still write bījas in a modified form of Siddhaṃ . A recent innovation is the writing of Japanese language slogans on T-shirts using Bonji. Japanese Siddhaṃ has evolved from the original script used to write sūtras and is now somewhat different from the ancient script. It is typical to see Siddhaṃ written with
147-679: The Eastern Nagari , Tirhuta , Odia and also the Nepalese scripts in the eastern and northeastern regions of South Asia , leaving East Asia as the only region where Siddhaṃ is still used. There were special forms of Siddhaṃ used in Korea that varied significantly from those used in China and Japan, and there is evidence that Siddhaṃ was written in Central Asia , as well, by the early 7th century. As
168-672: The CBETA font Siddhamkey 3.0 has been produced. Siddhaṃ script was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Siddhaṃ is U+11580–U+115FF: This is a gallery of example usages of the Siddham script. Tirhuta script The Tirhuta or Maithili script was the primary historical script for the Maithili language , as well as one of
189-469: The Devanagari script is officially recognized. Most of the consonant letters are effectively identical to Bengali–Assamese. The Unicode submission, for example, only bothered to create new graphic designs for 7 of the 33 letters: ⟨jh, ṭ, ḍh, ṇ, l, ś, h⟩ . Tirhuta script uses its own signs for the positional decimal numeral system . The first two images shown below are samples illustrating
210-587: The Gupta Brahmi script in the late 6th century CE. Many Buddhist texts taken to China along the Silk Road were written using a version of the Siddhaṃ script. This continued to evolve, and minor variations are seen across time, and in different regions. Importantly, it was used for transmitting the Buddhist tantra texts. At the time it was considered important to preserve the pronunciation of mantras, and Chinese
231-481: The Japanese had adopted. This led to multiple variants of the same characters. Siddhaṃ is an abugida rather than an alphabet , as each character indicates a syllable, including a consonant and (possibly) a vowel. If the vowel sound is not explicitly indicated, the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks are used to indicate other vowels, as well as the anusvara and visarga . A virama can be used to indicate that
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#1732844845479252-490: The Japanese is written from top to bottom, as is typical of Japanese, and then the manuscript is turned back again, and the Siddhaṃ writing is continued from left to right (the resulting Japanese characters appear sideways). Over time, additional markings were developed, including punctuation marks, head marks, repetition marks, end marks, special ligatures to combine conjuncts and rarely to combine syllables, and several ornaments of
273-402: The consonant letter stands alone with no vowel, which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. Siddhaṃ texts were usually written from left to right then top to bottom, as with other Brahmic scripts, but occasionally they were written in the traditional Chinese style, from top to bottom then right to left. Bilingual Siddhaṃ-Japanese texts show the manuscript turned 90 degrees clockwise and
294-456: The historical scripts for Sanskrit . It is believed to have originated in the 13th century CE. It is very similar to Bengali–Assamese script , with most consonants being effectively identical in appearance. For the most part, writing in Maithili has switched to the Devanagari script , which is used to write neighbouring Central Indic languages to the west and north such as Hindi and Nepali , and
315-481: The number of people with a working knowledge of Tirhuta has dropped considerably in recent years. Before 14th CE, Tirhuta was exclusively used to write Sanskrit; later Maithili was written in this script. Despite the near universal switch from Tirhuta to the Devanagari script for writing Maithili, some traditional pundits still use the script for sending one another ceremonial letters ( pātā ) related to some important function such as marriage. Metal type for this script
336-457: The scribe's choice, which are not currently encoded. The nuqta is also used in some modern Siddhaṃ texts. In Japan , the writing of mantras and copying/reading of sutras using the Siddhaṃ script is still practiced in the esoteric schools of Shingon Buddhism and Tendai as well as in the syncretic sect of Shugendō . The characters are known as Bonji ( 梵字 , Chinese: Fànzì ) or shittan ( 悉曇 ) . The Taishō Tripiṭaka version of
357-514: The time Kūkai learned this script, the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India had been closed by the expanding Abbasid Caliphate . In the middle of the 9th century, China experienced a series of purges of "foreign religions", thus cutting Japan off from the sources of Siddhaṃ texts. In time, other scripts, particularly Devanagari , replaced Siddhaṃ in India, while Siddhaṃ 's northeastern derivative called Gaudi evolved to become
378-541: Was created by an engraver from Kannauj who was "proficient in the Kutila character". It also includes the date of the inscription, Vikram Samvat 1049, which corresponds to 992 CE. The word Kutila (कुटिल) means crooked in the Sanskrit language, and it is assumed that the name came from the curving shapes of Kutila letters, distinct from the straighter lines of the Brahmi and Gupta scripts. The Unicode encoding for Siddham
399-508: Was done with Chinese characters, Japanese Buddhist scholars sometimes created multiple characters with the same phonological value to add meaning to Siddhaṃ characters. This practice, in effect, represents a 'blend' of the Chinese style of writing and the Indian style of writing and allows Sanskrit texts in Siddhaṃ to be differentially interpreted as they are read, as was done with Chinese characters that
420-664: Was first produced in the 1920s in Nepal, and digital fonts in the 1990s in India. The Constitution of Nepal and the 2003 inclusion of Maithili in the VIIIth Schedule of the Indian Constitution , having accorded official recognition to it as a language independent of Hindi. There is a possibility that this might lead to efforts to re-implement Tirhuta on a wider basis, in accord with similar trends in Nepal reinforcing separate identities for Maithili. However, currently, only Maithili in
441-529: Was not suitable for writing the sounds of Sanskrit. This led to the retention of the Siddhaṃ script in East Asia. The practice of writing using Siddhaṃ survived in East Asia where Tantric Buddhism persisted. Kūkai introduced the Siddhaṃ script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda -trained monks including one known as Prajñā ( Chinese : 般若三藏 ; pinyin : Bōrě Sāncáng ; 734– c. 810 ). By
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