Siddham Jha 𑖖

Jha is the voiced aspirate of the palatal class and one of the least used letters in the syllabary. It occurs in a small number of roots, most of them onomatopoeic or of uncertain origin, and it is rarer still in the Buddhist texts that were copied in Siddham. A scribe might write it a handful of times in a working life.

Its presence in the table follows from the same principle that puts the unused vowels there. The arrangement describes the sound system as the phoneticians analysed it, and a class of five missing its fourth member would break the pattern that makes the other four predictable. A learner who can recite one class can recite them all only because none of them has a hole in it.

The letter behaves like any other consonant sign on the page. It takes the vowel marks, carries the inherent short a, and can enter conjuncts, though its low frequency means very few of those combinations are ever needed. It stands fourth in its class, in the slot every class reserves for the letter carrying voicing and aspiration at once, and a reader can name it from that position without ever having met it in a word.

It is the sort of letter that separates two ways of describing a script. An inventory of what actually gets written would leave it out; an inventory of what the tradition transmits cannot. This atlas records the second, which is why the Siddham table here has forty-seven entries rather than the smaller number a count weighted by frequency would produce.

A great many Buddhist works are known today in a Chinese translation and in a Sanskrit original, and a good number are known in the translation alone. Where both survive, comparing them is one of the most productive things a scholar can do, and the Siddham letters are frequently what makes the comparison possible at the level of individual words.

The reason is the untranslated material. A translator rendering a sutra into Chinese translated the prose and transcribed the mantras and dharani, and those transcriptions are anchored to particular Sanskrit sounds. Where the Sanskrit original also survives, the two can be lined up, and where it does not, the transcription plus a knowledge of the transcription conventions gives a partial reconstruction of what stood there. Manuscripts in Siddham preserved in Japan have been used in exactly this way, since they sometimes carry the Sanskrit for a passage whose Indian witnesses are lost.

The work has limits that are worth stating. A transcription is approximate, the conventions changed over time, and reconstructing a word from one is a reasoned inference rather than a reading. Editions built that way say so, and mark what is recovered as distinct from what is attested. The atlas follows the same principle: what a source establishes is one thing, and what it makes plausible is another.