Siddham A 𑖀

The independent letter A is written only where a word opens on the vowel, and in the Buddhist vocabulary copied in Siddham that turns out to be very often. Sanskrit forms its commonest negative by prefixing a short a to a word, or an before a vowel, and the doctrinal terms built that way are among the most repeated in the whole literature: the word for impermanence, the word for no-self, the word for non-violence. A page of doctrinal argument therefore carries the independent vowel far more often than a page of narrative would, which is one of the small ways the subject of a text shows in its letters before anyone has read it.

Elsewhere the letter is invisible in the ordinary sense, because it is the vowel every consonant sign already carries. A reader meets it as the absence of any other mark. Where a consonant closes a syllable with no vowel at all, a stroke is added to cancel the inherent a; where two vowels meet across a word boundary, Sanskrit merges them by rule, so a short a followed by another short a is written as the long vowel and the join disappears from the page. Reading Siddham means undoing those joins, which is one reason the study of the script in East Asia was never separable from the study of the grammar behind it.

In the teaching of the table A is the first thing said and the first thing written. Its position is not an accident of arrangement: the phoneticians put the least shaped sound first and worked outwards from it, so the letter that opens the syllabary is the one that asks the least of the mouth.

Siddham reached Japan as part of a deliberate import. Kukai, the monk later known by the posthumous title Kobo Daishi, travelled to Tang China with an official embassy in 804 and studied at the capital under the master Huiguo, from whom he received the esoteric transmission. He returned in 806 with texts, ritual implements, a lineage and the script, and the school he founded, Shingon, has written Sanskrit in Siddham ever since. Saicho, his contemporary and the founder of Tendai, brought back a parallel esoteric transmission, which is why the same letters serve both schools.

The script travelled because the words did not. Mantras and dharani were not translated into Chinese or Japanese but transcribed, on the reasoning that what they do depends on the sound rather than on the sense, so a tradition that took them seriously had to be able to write and read the sounds. Chinese characters could approximate them and did, in enormous quantity, but an approximation cannot be reversed reliably: several Sanskrit sounds fall together in it, and a reader working back from the characters cannot tell which was meant. The Siddham letter records the sound exactly, and so it came as equipment rather than as ornament.

What followed is the reason this alphabet can be described at all. Siddham fell out of use in India, displaced by the scripts that grew out of the same Gupta stock, while in Japan it went on being copied, taught, carved and printed without a break. A script the country of its birth stopped writing survived because a school on another set of islands could not do without it.