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.

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.

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