aṃ

'GBH' asked on the blog about this form of the seed syllable aṃ which is an image in the Japanese Wikipedia commons. The text accompanying it is in Japanese but it appears the the image was scanned from a book called 悉曇章の研究 (and is therefore a breach of copyright!)

This is simply a variety Siddhaṃ. It looks like it was either done with a Chinese Calligraphy brush or is designed to look that way. Note that even contemporary Siddhaṃ calligraphy can vary quite widely in style.


Compare with my pen style 'a' (left, and here) - the shape is the same: a shape like a number 3 linked by a mid-height line to a vertical stroke on the right. The contemporary a in Devanāgarī is similar as well: अं. The dot above the aṃ is the basic anusvāra which indicates nasalisation of the vowel. Anusvāra (anu + svāra) means after-sound, or following sound. Often with bīja mantras the anusvāra is exchanged for the chandra-bindu (moon and dot) which has the same phonetic effect, but which involves a more elaborate symbollism.

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