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Siddham is a medieval Indian script that stopped being used in the country that invented it centuries ago. It did not vanish. It travelled to Japan with Buddhist texts, and it is still written there today, letter by letter, as an object of devotion.

A Complete Alphabet, Kept Twice Over

Siddham grew out of the Brahmi script of early medieval India and was carried east along the routes Buddhist texts travelled. It fell out of everyday use in India itself, but the Shingon and Tendai schools of Japanese Buddhism each preserve the complete alphabet, every one of its forty-seven letters, known there as shittan. Every one of those letters traces back to Sanskrit, the language the earliest Buddhist texts these schools inherited were written in.

When a Letter Is a Buddha

What makes Siddham unusual even among preserved scripts is what Shingon does with individual letters. Certain ones are recorded here as sacred in their own right to a specific buddha, not as a symbol standing in for that buddha but as the buddha itself in sound and shape. The letter Ha, for instance, is sacred to Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light. In Shingon practice, tracing or chanting the letter is understood to be an encounter with the figure it belongs to, not a reference to one.

Where To Read More

• SiddhamBrahmic Script FamilyThe script itself, extinct in India and complete in two Japanese schools
• ShingonBuddhismOne of the two schools that preserve all forty-seven letters
• TendaiBuddhismThe other school, holding the same complete set independently
• Siddham Ha 𑖮Siddham LettersThe letter recorded as sacred to Amitabha in its own right
• AmitabhaBuddhist DeitiesThe buddha the letter Ha is held to be, rather than merely represent