Questions

Douglas wrote in recently to ask for help...

I'm studying an alpha chart of Sanskrit in what I believe to be the Siddham Script. The first letter box (a) has a picture of what looks like a pomegranate.

Does "pomegranate" translate into a word that starts with the letter"a" in Sanskrit? Something like "anara"?

I replied:

The script is plain-old Devanagari I'm afraid, not Siddham. But you have read it correctly. The word is anāra and it is the name for pomegranate in Hindi.

The Sanskrit word for pomegranate is dāḍima, दाडिम

Tattoos are dumb

I regularly get emails that go something like this (a recent real example):

i've been planning to get a tattoo of a few words in pali. obviously, i want to make sure i get the translations right and provide the artist with accurate calligraphy.

I'll leave this person's name out of it to save them some embarrassment because I think this is plain stupid. Why have something that you do not understand, in a language you do not speak, in a script you do not read or write, marked on your body for the rest of your life? I fail to see any possible benefit in this kind of action. I especially fail to see how this could possibly be spiritually beneficial as personal adornment is just venial and shallow.

The person above could spend a few pounds/dollars on Warder's Introduction to Pali and within a few months of study find themselves reading Pali texts in Roman script. Now that would be a good use of time and money! Pali is not a difficult language to learn (as these things go) and reading the texts in the original is quite rewarding. The Vipassana Research Institute give away the entire Burmese edition of the Pali Canon plus commentaries and para-canonical literature on CD, and on the web. The Sri Lankan Tipitika is also largely available online. The more ambitious could learn the traditional Burmese, Sri Lankan, or Thai scripts that the manuscripts are preserved in. The Buddhists reading this could even try to practice what they read which is of course the most beneficial thing to do.

In sum let me reiterate that I think tattoos are dumb, and that having a tattoo that you don't understand and can't read is doubly dumb. Please don't ask me to help with tattoos.

Gothic Siddham?

This chart for a Gothic Siddham character set popped onto the Visible Mantra radar recently. It's messy and doesn't entirely work, but it does raise an interesting possibility in terms of where Siddham calligraphy might go in the west.

Original at: naeddyr.deviantart.com

Naeddyr is a young Finnish "wannabe novelist".

Mantra Chanting Workshop - 10 Feb 2008

All sounds are the voice of the Buddha teaching the Dharma...

This will be a day of exploration and inquiry into mantra practice using meditation, and different approaches to chanting mantras. At the Cambridge Buddhist Centre.

See the Learn page for more details.