Siddham
In every culture where it appeared, writing has been considered magical. Letters and characters have been used to form words and sentences, do business, govern, conduct love affairs—in short, to communicate meaning to other human beings. But letters have also been thought to have the power to communicate with unseen energies and beings, and to contain in their very shapes, and in the act of writing them, the kernel of these energies. This was true of Hebrew, Greek, and then Roman letters. These alphabets all have esoteric meanings as well as their usual significance. It was certainly true of Sanskrit, where the very name of one of the principle alphabets—Devanagari—means “gift from the city of the gods.”
Foil stamp print of the seed syllable A.
The first letter of the Siddham alphabet, A is seen as the origin of all letters, all speech, all elements.
This print was inspired by a liturgical reference to the “beauty of the white light of A.”
The letters shown here are written in Siddham. Arising in India from the extremely ancient root script Brahma-lipi, Siddham became, together with Devanagari, one of the leading hands in the classical Gupta period (4th-7th century AD.) These were the letters used to write down the Buddhist canon for the first time; these were the letters the first Chinese pilgrims saw when they arrived at Nalanda University and other centers of learning in India, and these were the letters—principally Siddham—they used to copy essential texts before walking back to China with them.
“Siddham” means “perfected.” It came to be used chiefly for writing religious texts: short sutras, dharanis, mantras, and seed syllables. This seems to have been especially true during the 5th to 8th centuries AD, a period that also saw the rise of tantric, or esoteric, Buddhism, in which many meditations incorporated the use of seed syllables.
The idea that a written or spoken word could allude to, invoke, or contain the essence of an energy—or for that matter, a particular deity, Buddha, or bodhisattva—was not difficult for a literate Chinese, given the pictographic nature of their own writing. Siddham was taken back to China and propagated among Buddhist tantric adepts, including the renown Amoghavajra.
As a mystical system of writing, Siddham came into full flower in the 9th and 10th centuries in Japan, in the Tendai, and Shingon schools of esoteric Buddhism. Here, entire pantheons of Buddhas and their spiritual families would be elaborately arranged in mandalas, represented only by bija (seed syllables) instead of by painted portraits.
for further reading see:
—Stevens, John, Sacred Calligraphy of the East; Shambhala Publications, 1995
—van Gulik, R.H. Siddham, An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and India, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi
