The Letter That Does Not Perish
The Sanskrit word for a letter is akṣara, the imperishable. A letter does not pass away when the hand that wrote it is gone, because the sound it carries was never made by a hand. The Perfection of Wisdom sūtras open the doorway of the first letter with a single recognition. All phenomena are unborn from the beginning, and so the sound present within every other sound is the gate through which the Dharma is entered. The tantric commentaries, among them the Vimalaprabhā on the Kālacakra, read the word one step further. The imperishable is the unchanging great bliss, and the letter is the name given to its display.
The classical explanation of mantra says the same in fewer words. Mantra protects the one who reflects on it. The protection arises in the reflecting mind, and a shape on a page can only support it.
From this ground the matter of scripts takes its proper shape. Across a thousand years and half a continent, practitioners of Secret Mantra have envisioned the letters of their deities in Siddhaṃ, in Lantsa, in the Tibetan uchen, in Nāgarī and in Śāradā. The masters who reflected on these hands began, each in his own way, from what a letter is.
Five faces of one hand
These five scripts are kin. Brāhmī gave rise to the Gupta hand of the fourth to seventh centuries. From Gupta came Siddhaṃ, the early Nāgarī, Śāradā, and the model on which Thönmi Sambhoṭa shaped the Tibetan alphabet in the seventh century. The uchen letter is therefore a contemporary of Siddhaṃ, born from the same Gupta stroke in the same age. Śāradā grew in Kashmir and became the hand of the paṇḍitas who taught the Buddhist tantras in Tibet in the eleventh century. Nāgarī, and its descendant Devanāgarī, became the common hand of Sanskrit in India. Rañjanā arose in the Pāla period in the Nepalese valley, and the Tibetans took it up around the eleventh century under the name Lantsa.
The seed syllables themselves show the kinship. The Siddhaṃ and uchen forms of the great letters are built from the same strokes, differing only by a curve or a hook. What looks like five spiritual technologies is one inheritance in five regional hands.
Each hand has its home. Siddhaṃ lives in the Shingon and Tendai lineages of Japan, where Kūkai carried it in the year 806 and where it has been written without interruption for more than twelve hundred years. Lantsa lives in the Himalayas, on the title pages of the translated scriptures, on mani stones and prayer wheels, and in the calligraphy of mantra garlands. Uchen lives wherever Tibetan is read, and in the Nyingma practice of today it is the hand in which most practitioners see the letters of the heart. Nāgarī and Śāradā live in the manuscripts of India and Kashmir, the Sanskrit editions from which the Tibetans translated. In the instructions for envisioning letters, the emphasis falls on colour, size, position and luminosity, and the scripts are not ranked against one another.
The sound before the hand
The Great Perfection places the letter in its true setting. The sound, light and rays of dharmatā are the spontaneous display of rigpa, and every letter envisioned on the path is a small, concentrated reflection of that display. The root tantra called the Reverberation of Sound speaks of this natural resonance of the ground, which pervades everything and was never produced by anyone. That sound has no script, because it is the source from which every script was drawn.
Rigzin Jigme Lingpa’s Yeshe Lama uses the letter at its most intimate moments. When wind and mind have been unsettled by the experiences of the path, he teaches counting the letter that is the heart of the unborn, and by this the practitioner is restored to the true path. The same letter appears in the instructions for the night and in the instruction for the hour of death. In none of these does he name the script. He names the colour, the smallness, the luminosity and the dissolving, and these are the qualities that matter. What the Great Perfection asks of a letter is that it be clear enough to hold the mind and empty enough to let the mind go.
Consider the preliminaries of the Longchen Nyingthig. The practitioner envisions the moon disc at the heart of Vajrasattva with the garland of the hundred syllables turning around it, each letter as fine as if drawn with a single hair. Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo describes the practice with this precision in his guide to the preliminaries. The letters are a support by which the mind is gathered and the blessing received. In the main practice the letter becomes the vehicle in which wind and awareness travel, and in the natural state it has already dissolved into space.
Nāda, kalā, bindu
A letter has a body and an inner life. The body is what the hand draws, in whatever script. The inner life is a movement, and our Root-Teacher speaks of it in his commentary on the Longchen Nyingthig as the movement from nāda to kalā to bindu. Nāda is the resonance in which the letter sounds, the sound before it becomes a sound. Kalā is the fine portion in which that resonance gathers. Bindu, the thigle, is the single drop in which the whole letter is concentrated.
These three do not stand side by side like the parts of a machine. They dissolve into one another. The nāda dissolves into the kalā, the kalā into the bindu, and the bindu into emptiness-awareness.
Read in this way, the practice of the letter is a journey from the outer to the inner, and each stage leaves behind a layer of what could be grasped. The written glyph, with its curves and hooks, belongs to the outermost layer, and the sound that rises from it is subtler. The fine portion is subtler than the sound, and the drop is subtler still, until nothing remains that can be held. The bindu does not end in blankness. It dissolves into emptiness-awareness, the same expanse in which the practitioner of the Great Perfection is introduced to rigpa. The letter that began as an object of envisioning ends as the recognition of the one who envisions.
This movement settles the question of scripts at its root. The five hands differ in the body of the letter, in the strokes that curve one way or another. The journey inward does not differ. Whatever hand drew the body of the letter, the nāda dissolves into the kalā, the kalā into the bindu, and the bindu into emptiness-awareness, and that last expanse has no hand at all.
The body writes in its own hand
For many centuries Tibetan teachers instructed their students to envision seed syllables and mantra garlands in Lantsa. The Indian letters were the letters of the original tantras, and to see them in their Indian dress was to stand close to the source.
Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, the nineteenth-century master who gathered the treasures of all the schools, taught that this was not essential. His lineage records the reason. According to the tantras, when the aggregates, elements and sense fields of the body take form, the letters of the subtle body arise in the channel-wheels, and these letters appear in the native script of the practitioner’s own country. A Tibetan therefore envisions them in Tibetan, a Chinese practitioner in Chinese characters, and an Indian practitioner in the Indian hand.
The teaching bears being heard in full. It does not say that the Tibetan letter is easier. It says that the letter envisioned is the letter already present in the vajra body. In the mother tantras, the Hevajra and the Cakrasaṃvara, the vowels and consonants stand upon the petals of the wheels, and the practitioner who envisions them is recognising what is already there. The body writes its letters in its own hand, because the body was formed by a mind that grew up in a particular language and culture. This is a Dzogchen insight spoken in tantric language. The display takes the form of the one who displays it, and no letter exists apart from the awareness that sees it.
The teaching has a corollary that gives it strength. If the letters appear in the native hand, the foreign hand is not wrong, for it is another form of the same display. A practitioner trained in Lantsa or Siddhaṃ, who sees the letter in that script, sees a letter as real as any other. Letters are strongest when they appear most naturally and clearly to the mind that beholds them, and no script can claim that distinction in advance.
Siddhaṃ and the world as letter
The lineage of Kūkai builds upon the glyph more fully than any other, and it deserves a hearing at its own depth. In the Shōji jissōgi, “The Meaning of Sound, Word and Reality,” Kūkai teaches that sound, word and what they disclose are not three things. The Dharmakāya speaks the Dharma through letters, and the world itself is the text in which that speech is written. The first letter of the alphabet is the unborn ground of all phenomena. The Mahāvairocana-sūtra, on which Kūkai drew, teaches the practitioner to envision the letter upon a moon disc and a lotus. It also teaches placing the letters of the alphabet around the body while seeing oneself as the Buddha. This is the practice of the ajikan, done in Siddhaṃ for twelve hundred years.
Siddhaṃ teaches something further about why a script matters. The Chinese primer Xitan zi ji, composed around the year 800, was written so that mantra reciters might pronounce the syllables correctly. The Chinese monks valued Siddhaṃ because it preserved the sound. A mantra written in Chinese characters loses its phonology, while a mantra written in an Indic script keeps it. Kūkai’s Ungi gi reads the strokes of the heart-vajra syllable one by one for their meaning, and the Tibetan tradition performs the same analysis on the same syllable in uchen. The method is shared and only the hand differs.
Where the script matters
The masters never said the script was irrelevant. They said it was secondary, and the distinction rewards being drawn precisely.
The script matters first for sound. Tibetan spelling of mantra follows Tibetan pronunciation, so that the Sanskrit vajra is commonly written and said benza. An Indic script carries the Sanskrit sound-structure intact: the long and the short vowel, the dental and the retroflex consonant, the nasal and the breath that close a syllable. The practitioner who wishes to recite with exactness does well to learn to read one.
It matters second for the analysis of the letter. The practitioner who learned a meditation by taking apart the strokes of a letter should envision the letter whose strokes he has learned.
It matters third for steadiness. Changing the script of the envisioned letter in the middle of a sādhana scatters the mind. Whichever script is chosen, it is held, because the discipline of envisioning is the discipline of a clear, small, stable and luminous form.
And it matters fourth for the lineage’s own instruction. Where a sādhana prescribes a script, its holders have already decided, and the way of respect is to follow it. A master with the authority of the lineage may give another instruction, as Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo did.
The letter in the light
A letter is powerful to the degree that the mind is gathered in it, the transmission has empowered it, and its sound is faithfully recited. These three can be present in any of the five scripts. For a Tibetan practitioner, uchen is the natural hand of the envisioned letter, because it is the hand in which the body writes itself and the one that can be held most easily. Lantsa carries the authority of the translated transmissions and remains the script of the sādhanas that prescribe it. Siddhaṃ is the script of Kūkai’s lineage and of the ajikan. For exact Sanskrit sound, an Indic script serves better than Tibetan, and the choice among them is a matter of which the practitioner reads fluently.
