Siddham Script (Sanskrit Bija Letters)

Siddham (siddhaṃ, 'accomplished, perfected') is the script in which Buddhist Sanskrit travelled from India across China to Japan. It grew out of the Gupta script of northern India around the 6th century and was the everyday hand for Sanskrit there for some five hundred years, until Nagari, the ancestor of the Devanagari on the Hindi Alphabet & Letters and Nepali Alphabet & Letters pages, replaced it in about the 12th century. Its name comes from the word that scribes wrote at the top of a manuscript before anything else: siddhaṃ or siddhir astu, 'may there be success'. That opening survives as its own character, 𑗁, the siddham sign.

The script left India inside sutras and mantras. Chinese monks of the Tang dynasty learned it so that they could pronounce dharani correctly, and called it 悉曇 xitan. In 806 the monk Kūkai, founder of the Shingon school and remembered as Kōbō Daishi, came home to Japan from Chang'an with esoteric teachings, mandalas and Siddham manuals including the Xitan ziji, a Tang primer of the letters. Saichō, founder of Tendai, brought the same learning to Mount Hiei. In Japan the letters are called bonji (梵字, 'Brahma letters', that is, Sanskrit letters) or shittan (悉曇), and the Japanese monks wrote them with a brush and with the bokuhitsu, a flat-cut wooden pen that gives bonji their heavy angled strokes.

Siddham is the only Indian script whose living home is outside India. It died out in India itself, but Shingon and Tendai temples never stopped writing it: on the wooden sotoba planks set up at graves, on the five-tiered stone gorintō pagodas, on amulets and temple stamps, in the a-ji-kan meditation on the letter 𑖀, and in a learned tradition of Sanskrit study, shittangaku, that runs from Annen's Shittanzō of 880 to the thousand-fascicle grammar of Jiun Sonja in the 18th century. Today Siddham is also in use among Chinese Buddhists and among scholars who set early Sanskrit manuscripts exactly as written.

The Siddham alphabet in order: vowels, vargas and the 51 letters

Siddham is an abugida, like every script descended from Brahmi (see Brahmi & Kharoshthi (Ashoka's Scripts)). Each consonant letter carries a built-in short a: 𑖎 alone reads ka. To change the vowel you attach a mark, 𑖎𑖰 ki, 𑖎𑖳 kū, 𑖎𑖸 ke; the marks sit before, after, above or below the letter, which is why the grid above shows them separately from the independent vowel letters 𑖀 𑖁 𑖂 𑖃 used at the start of a word. The virama 𑖿 removes the a, and a consonant followed by virama and another consonant fuses into one stacked sign, so 𑖮𑖿𑖨𑖱𑖾 hrīḥ is written ha + virama + ra + ī + visarga and shows as a single tall syllable in a good font. Siddham runs left to right.

The order is the Sanskrit order, which Indian grammarians fixed by where each sound is made. First the vowels, short then long: 𑖀 a, 𑖁 ā, 𑖂 i, 𑖃 ī, 𑖄 u, 𑖅 ū, 𑖆 ṛ, 𑖇 ṝ, 𑖈 ḷ, 𑖉 ḹ, 𑖊 e, 𑖋 ai, 𑖌 o, 𑖍 au, then 𑖀𑖽 aṁ and 𑖀𑖾 aḥ, which are 𑖀 with the anusvara and the visarga. Then the consonants in five vargas of five, each a row of the chart: 𑖎 𑖏 𑖐 𑖑 𑖒 ka kha ga gha ṅa from the throat, 𑖓 𑖔 𑖕 𑖖 𑖗 ca cha ja jha ña from the palate, 𑖘 𑖙 𑖚 𑖛 𑖜 ṭa ṭha ḍa ḍha ṇa with the tongue curled back, 𑖝 𑖞 𑖟 𑖠 𑖡 ta tha da dha na at the teeth and 𑖢 𑖣 𑖤 𑖥 𑖦 pa pha ba bha ma at the lips. Within a row the order is always voiceless, aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated, nasal. After them come the semivowels 𑖧 𑖨 𑖩 𑖪 ya ra la va and the sibilants 𑖫 𑖬 𑖭 śa ṣa sa, with 𑖮 ha last.

Japanese tradition counts the letters as a jimon of 51: the 16 vowels (including aṁ and aḥ), the 33 consonants, and two conjuncts that the primers treat as letters, 𑖩𑖿𑖩𑖽 llaṁ and 𑖎𑖿𑖬 kṣa. The Siddham chapter that Shingon novices still chant, the Shittan-jūhasshō, runs every consonant through every vowel in exactly this order, so the varga grid is not only a dictionary order but a sound that temples have been reciting for twelve centuries.

Sanskrit bija letters: seed syllables and the Buddhas they stand for

A bija (bīja, 'seed'; Japanese shuji 種字) is a single syllable that holds a whole deity or truth. In esoteric Buddhism a Buddha can be shown three ways: as a figure, as the object he holds, or as his seed syllable, and mandalas drawn entirely in Siddham bija, called shuji mandara, hang in Shingon temples. The first and greatest is 𑖀 a: the first sound, present in every consonant, and so the symbol of the unborn source of all things and of Dainichi Nyorai, the cosmic Buddha of the Womb Realm. Meditating on a golden 𑖀 on a lotus in a moon disc is a-ji-kan, the basic Shingon meditation. In the Diamond Realm Dainichi is 𑖪𑖽 vaṁ (read ban in Japanese) instead.

The other seed syllables most people look for belong to the Thirteen Buddhas who preside over Japanese memorial rites and to the eight guardians of the twelve zodiac animals: 𑖮𑖿𑖨𑖱𑖾 hrīḥ (kirīku) for Amida and for Senju Kannon, 𑖮𑖯𑖽 hāṁ (kān) for the fierce Fudō Myōō, 𑖦𑖽 maṁ (man) for Monju, 𑖀𑖽 aṁ (an) for Fugen, 𑖝𑖿𑖨𑖯𑖾 trāḥ (tarāku) for Kokūzō, 𑖭𑖾 saḥ (saku) for Seishi, 𑖥𑖾 bhaḥ (baku) for Shaka, the historical Buddha, 𑖥𑖹 bhai (bai) for Yakushi, the healing Buddha, 𑖭 sa for Shō Kannon, 𑖮 ha (ka) for Jizō, 𑖧𑖲 yu for Miroku and 𑖮𑖳𑖽 hūṁ (ūn) for Ashuku and Aizen Myōō. By birth year: rat Senju Kannon 𑖮𑖿𑖨𑖱𑖾; ox and tiger Kokūzō 𑖝𑖿𑖨𑖯𑖾; rabbit Monju 𑖦𑖽; dragon and snake Fugen 𑖀𑖽; horse Seishi 𑖭𑖾; sheep and monkey Dainichi 𑖪𑖽; rooster Fudō 𑖮𑖯𑖽; dog and boar Amida 𑖮𑖿𑖨𑖱𑖾. This is the chart behind bonji amulets, pendants and tattoos, and the combos below give every one of them ready to copy.

Siddham also writes the mantras themselves. 𑖌𑖼 oṁ (Japanese on) opens most of them; in Siddham it is the letter 𑖌 o with the candrabindu 𑖼, though some texts use the anusvara 𑖌𑖽 instead. The five elements are the five letters 𑖀 𑖪 𑖨 𑖮 𑖏 a va ra ha kha (earth, water, fire, wind, space), which is why those five appear one above the other on a gorintō pagoda and on a sotoba grave plank. Oṁ maṇi padme hūṁ, the mantra of Avalokiteśvara, is 𑖌𑖼 𑖦𑖜𑖰 𑖢𑖟𑖿𑖦𑖸 𑖮𑖳𑖽, and the svāhā that closes so many mantras (Japanese sowaka) is 𑖭𑖿𑖪𑖯𑖮𑖯. Hindu bija such as oṁ, hrīṁ and śrīṁ are the same Sanskrit syllables; India writes them in Devanagari, so for ॐ and its relatives see Hindu Symbols & Emoji and Religious Symbols.

Manuscript marks: the siddham sign, dandas and the Japanese section ornaments

A Siddham text has its own punctuation. 𑗂 the danda ends a line of verse or a sentence and 𑗃 the double danda ends a verse, exactly as in Devanagari. 𑗄 and 𑗅, the separator dot and bar, divide syllables in Japanese primers that spell out a mantra one sound at a time. 𑗆 𑗇 𑗈 are repetition marks: a scribe writes a syllable once and marks it to be chanted twice or more. 𑗉 closes a whole text. And 𑗁, the siddham sign, is the auspicious opening; the same convention exists in other Indian scripts, so Unicode has siddham signs in Devanagari (꣼), Telugu, Kannada, Sharada and Nandinagari too, several of which are on Historic Scripts of India (Sharada, Takri, Khojki …).

The fourteen section marks 𑗊 to 𑗗 come from Japanese manuscripts, where they close a section of a mantra text with a small drawing: a trident above crescents, rays around dotted moons, double rings, stacked crescents from two to seven, circles inside enclosures. They were added in Unicode 8.0 at the request of the Japanese national body together with the alternate letters 𑗘 𑗙 𑗚 𑗛 𑗜 𑗝, the three-circle and two-circle forms of i and ī and the alternate u, which Japanese scribes use alongside the standard 𑖂 𑖃 𑖄. Use them when you are reproducing a Japanese text; for an Indian manuscript or an ordinary mantra, the standard letters are the ones to copy.

How to copy, type and display Siddham script

Tap any character above to copy it; the combos section gives each bija as a finished syllable. Siddham has been in Unicode since version 7.0 in June 2014, when 72 characters were encoded from Anshuman Pandey's proposal; the section marks and alternate letters followed in Unicode 8.0 a year later, making the 92 on this page. The letters live at U+11580 to U+115DD, in the supplementary planes, so in Microsoft Word you can type 11580 and press Alt+X to get 𑖀, and on Linux Ctrl+Shift+U then 11580. No phone or computer ships a Siddham keyboard, so most people copy from a page like this or run Roman transliteration through a converter such as Aksharamukha, which turns hrīḥ into 𑖮𑖿𑖨𑖱𑖾 for you.

Be honest with yourself about fonts. Hardly any device includes a Siddham font, so on a stock phone or Windows PC these characters show as empty boxes until you install one: the free Noto Sans Siddham from Google covers all 92 and stacks conjuncts correctly. The characters themselves are standard Unicode, so a syllable you paste into a message is intact and will render for anyone who has the font, and on this site they are shown with one. For an image to print or engrave, set the text in Noto Sans Siddham or trace it from a temple calligraphy model, because printed bonji written with the flat pen look quite different from the rounded Indian manuscript forms a font may use.

Three pitfalls. The vowel signs 𑖯 𑖰 𑖱 and the signs 𑖼 𑖽 𑖾 𑖿 are combining marks: copied on their own they attach to whatever stands before them, so always copy a complete syllable such as 𑖪𑖽, not the mark alone. A bija written with the wrong mark changes its reading: 𑖮𑖯𑖽 hāṁ needs the anusvara dot, 𑖭𑖾 saḥ the visarga. And Siddham is not Devanagari: ॐ, the om that every font shows, is a Devanagari character, and the Siddham oṁ is 𑖌𑖼; which one you want depends on whether you are writing a Japanese bonji or an Indian mantra. For the Japanese scripts that stand beside bonji on a temple board, see Japanese Characters; for the script of Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Alphabet & Letters.