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| Siddhaṃ | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type | Abugida | |
| Spoken languages | Sanskrit | |
| Time period | c. 770–c. 1200 in India, and to the present in Japan | |
| Parent systems | Proto-Canaanite alphabet [a] → Phoenician alphabet [a] → Aramaic alphabet [a] → Brāhmī → Gupta → Siddhaṃ | |
| Child systems | Tibetan and its descendants | |
| Sister systems | Nāgarī Śāradā | |
 The word Siddhaṃ in the Siddhaṃ script | ||
| [a] The Semitic origin of the Brahmic scripts is not universally agreed upon. | ||
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Siddhaṃ (Sanskrit सिद्धं, accomplished or perfected) — is the name of a North Indian script used for writing Sanskrit. Descended from the Brahmi script via the Gupta script, which also gave rise to the Devanāgarī script as well as a number of other Asian scripts such as Tibetan script.
Siddhaṃ is an abugida or alphasyllabary rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable, but it does not include every possible syllable. If no other mark occurs then the short \'a\' is assumed. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, the pure nasal (anusvāra), and the aspirated vowel (visarga). A special mark (virama) can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel, which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. See links below for examples.
The writing of mantras and copying of Sutras using the Siddhaṃ script is practiced solely in Japan—where the characters are known as shittan (悉曇?) or bonji (梵字?)—in the esoteric Buddhist schools of Shingon and Tendai Buddhism as well as in the syncretic sect of Shugendō; its use has died out in other places. Kūkai introduced the Siddham script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda-trained monks including one known as Prajñā. Sutras taken to China from India were written in a variety of scripts, Siddham being one of the most important. By the time Kūkai learned this script, the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India, part of the Silk Road, were closed by the expanding Islamic empire of the Abbasids. 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, and so Japan was left as the only place where Siddhaṃ was preserved, although it was, and continues to be, used mainly for writing mantras and copying sutras. A recent innovation is writing Japanese teeshirt slogans using Bonji.
The software Mojikyo contains fonts for Siddham.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
