Korean Siddhaṃ

img_5217
Originally uploaded by parhessiastes

As promised Parhessiastes has posted some more Korean Siddhaṃ on his Flickr site - this one is an oṃ. Some of the others are more difficult to decipher and I'm casting around academic forums to see if there is anyone who might be able to shed some light on the subject. Don't know even if Siddhaṃ is the correct word for it, but it mostly seems based on Siddhaṃ forms. If you know more please get in touch.

vajrasattva-mantra

vajrasattva-mantra
Originally uploaded by jayarava

This mantra can be seen on a statue of Vajrasattva in the British Museum. It is flanked by the ye dharma hetu prabhava verse. It clearly starts oṃ aḥ hūṃ and ends svāhāḥ, but much of the rest of it remains obscure to me. If you can read this mantra drop me a line.

Henro Jacket Siddhaṃ

Alain sent in this image of a Siddhaṃ character from a Japanese Henro, or pilgrim's, jacket. He wondered what it says.

The character is yu.

In Shingon this is the bīja or seed-syllable of the Bodhisattva Maitreya or Miroku Bosatsu (弥勒菩薩) in Japanese. Maitreya will be the next Buddha, and is said to waiting in the Tusita Heaven realm for the right time to appear. Perhaps unfortunately for us this time will be billions of years in the future, and will occur only when all the last traces of Śakyamuni's teachings have disappeared.

His mantra in Shingon is: oṃ maitreya svāhā

The Tibetan traditions use a different bīja - maiṃ - and mantra for Maitreya which are featured on the Visible Mantra Maitreya page. The mantra being: oṃ maitri mahāmaitri maitriye svāhā.

White Tārā in Tibetan?

Christine wrote in to ask about a Tibetan version of the White Tārā mantra. I had left this off the White Tārā page and so I got to work and did some uchen calligraphy of the mantra. I have also added some of the other variants of the Tārā mantra that ask for help with specific problems or hindrances. Thanks Christine!

Siddham Question

Kwaidan
Originally uploaded by worsonic

Alex wrote in to ask what the Siddhaṃ syllable on this man's forehead is. The image is from a Japanese poster for the film Kwaidan, and appears on Worsonic's Flickr Site.

It is the short 'a' syllable. Which you can read about in several places on visible mantra, and in my Jayarava Rave essay The Essence of All Mantras.

Copyright

Another bozo has copied an entire page from this website, plus most of the text from another, into their blog - it's badly presented and unacknowledged. I hate this. I take a lot of time and effort to research these mantras; it took years to learn Siddham script, and I spend hours getting the calligraphy right; and many more making the website design functional and (hopefully) attractive to look at. I try to present everything within a coherent context which makes it more valuable that random bits and pieces.

My policy is to contact people where possible, but if I get no response to go over their heads. If it's Blogger or one of the other commercial blogging services it's quite easy to get the offender shut down. A claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is quite straight forward, costs me nothing, and at least one blog has been permanently shut down as a result of my taking action. I have no hesitation in following this up as it is theft. I offer this work out of love. I do get a trickle of income from ads (in 2 years I have still not reached the Google pay-out threshold, and I get one or two gift vouchers of £10 from Amazon in a year from books bought via the site) but that hardly covers costs. One or two people (over three years) have offered donations, but most - even when I do a personalised calligraphy for them - are reluctant to make any kind of contribution.

Please enjoy this site. Please feel free to write in and ask questions. I often do personalised calligraphy on request, and ask only for a donation (which many people refuse). Please feel free to use this stuff for your own practice and research - in the latter case a full citation and/or acknowledgement is required and I would prefer to be contacted personally. But if you just copy it wholesale, and try to pass it off as your work I will follow it up and where possible have your website shut down. Nothing personal, but don't steal my stuff.

Jayarava