Bhaiksuki Digit Two

It marks two in Bhaiksuki’s decimal digits.

Bhaiksuki appears in Buddhist writings in Sanskrit and Middle Indic languages, a group of historical Indic languages, associated with Bihar, West Bengal, Bangladesh, Tibet, Nepal and Burma (now Myanmar). Bhaiksuki is placed roughly in the 10th to 13th centuries CE; surviving inscriptions and manuscripts are mainly assigned to the 11th and 12th centuries CE.

Bhaiksuki is an Indic script derived from Brahmi, an older South Asian writing system; its structure resembles Devanagari. Arrow-headed, Point-headed and Sindhura are other names for the script, not names for this digit’s value.

Which Bhaiksuki sign means two?

Use 𑱒 for the ordinary decimal digit two.

Surviving manuscripts attest 𑱒 among Bhaiksuki’s decimal digits. The separate sign 𑱛 belongs to Bhaiksuki’s positional number system, where number signs are stacked by place.

In the proposal for encoding Bhaiksuki in Unicode, zero and three were reconstructed from related scripts used at the same time because no Bhaiksuki forms had been identified. 𑱒 itself was attested in surviving material, not reconstructed that way.