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, also known in its later evolved form as Siddhamātṛkā, is the name of a script used for writing Sanskrit from ca 600-1200. It is descended from the Brahmi script via the Gupta script, which gave rise to Tirhuta, the Assamese alphabet, the Bengali alphabet and the Tibetan alphabet. There is some confusion over the spelling: ' and ' are both common, though ' is preferred as "correct".〔Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, page 1215, col. 1 http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/〕 The script is a refinement of the script used during the Gupta Empire. The name arose from the practice of writing the word ', or ' (may there be perfection) at the head of documents. The word means "accomplished" or "perfected" in Sanskrit. Other names for the script include ''bonji'' ((日本語:梵字)) and . is an abugida rather than an alphabet because each character indicates a syllable, but it does not include every possible syllable. If no other mark occurs then the short 'a' is assumed. Diacritic marks indicate the other vowels, anusvara, and visarga. A virama can be used to indicate that the letter stands alone with no vowel, which sometimes happens at the end of Sanskrit words. ==History== Many Buddhist texts taken to China along the Silk Road were written using a version of the script. This continued to evolve, and minor variations are seen across time, and in different regions. Importantly it was used for transmitting the Buddhist tantra texts. At the time it was considered important to preserve the pronunciation of mantras, and Chinese was not suitable for writing the sounds of Sanskrit. This led to the retention of the script in East Asia. The practice of writing using survived in East Asia where Tantric Buddhism persisted. Kūkai introduced the script to Japan when he returned from China in 806, where he studied Sanskrit with Nalanda-trained monks including one known as Prajñā (, 734–c. 810). By the time Kūkai learned this script, the trading and pilgrimage routes over land to India, were closed by the expanding Abbasid Caliphate. In Japan the writing of mantras and copying of Sutras using the script is still practiced in the esoteric schools of Shingon Buddhism and Tendai as well as in the syncretic sect of Shugendō. The characters are known as or . The Taishō Tripiṭaka version of the Chinese Buddhist canon preserves the characters for most mantras and Korean Buddhists still write bījas in a modified form of . A recent innovation is the writing of Japanese language slogans on T-shirts using Bonji. Japanese has evolved from the original script used to write sūtras and is now somewhat different from the ancient script. It is typical to see written with brushes like Chinese writing, and it is also written with a bamboo pen; in Japan, a special brush called a is used for formal calligraphy. The informal style is known as . In the middle of the 9th century, China experienced a series of purges of "foreign religions", thus cutting Japan off from the sources of texts. In time, other scripts, particularly Devanagari replaced in India, while in Bengal, evolved to become the Bengali alphabet, leaving East Asia as the only region where is used. There were special forms of Siddham used in Korea that varied significantly from those used in China and Japan, and there is evidence that Siddham was written in Central Asia as well by the early 7th century. As was done with Chinese characters, Japanese Buddhist scholars sometimes created multiple characters with the same phonological value to add meaning to Siddham characters. This practice, in effect, represents a 'blend' of the Chinese style of writing and the Indian style of writing and allows Sanskrit texts in Siddham to be differentially interpreted as they are read, as was done with Chinese characters that the Japanese had adopted. This led to multiple variants of the same characters.〔http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2013/13110r-n4407.pdf〕 With regards to directionality, Siddham texts were usually read from left-to-right then top-to-bottom, as with Indic languages, but occasionally they were written in the traditional Chinese style, from top-to-bottom then right-to-left. Bilingual Siddham-Japanese texts show the manuscript turned 90 degrees clockwise and the Japanese is written from top-to-bottom, as is typical of Japanese, and then the manuscript is turned back again, and the Siddham writing is continued from left-to-right (the resulting Japanese characters look sideways). Over time, additional markings were developed, including punctuation marks, head marks, repetition marks, end marks, special ligatures to combine conjuncts and rarely to combine syllables, and several ornaments of the scribe's choice, which are not currently encoded. The ''nuqta'' is also used in some modern Siddham texts. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Siddhaṃ script」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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