Alphabet Letters
Siddham Ba 𑖤
Siddham Letters
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Origin The Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE.
Ba is the third letter of the labial class of the Siddham syllabary, the voiced labial stop. In many Indic manuscript hands the letters for ba and va are drawn so alike that scribes confuse them, and the two sounds fell together in several of the languages written with these scripts, so a manuscript reading of one is often an editorial decision about the other. Siddham shares the difficulty, and it is one of the standing problems in editing a Buddhist text preserved in the script. Where a copy was taken from dictation the same confusion can enter by the ear rather than the eye. In the table it stands third in its class, in the voiced half, exactly where the voiced member stands in each of the other four classes.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe Siddhamatrka hand from which Siddham takes its form grows out of the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and is current in Indian inscriptions and manuscripts from about the sixth century CE. 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Place of OriginNorthern India 3Tradition: Indian epigraphy Origin of the NameNamed by its own sound. Siddham letter names are the sound itself, as in the other Brahmic syllabaries, rather than borrowed words as in the Greek and Semitic alphabets. 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Sense of the Namethe voiced labial stop; third of the labial class 4Tradition: The Siddham syllabary in its traditional order Identity
Script TypeConsonant sign of a Brahmi-derived abugida; it carries the inherent short a unless a dependent vowel sign is written 1 PositionThirty-seventh letter of the Siddham order, third of the labial class 1Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attributions
Associated SoundVoiced unaspirated labial stop 2Tradition: Sanskrit phonetics of the grammarians Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourcePreserved in East Asia after the script had ceased to be written in India, and studied in Japan as shittan, the discipline of Sanskrit letter study transmitted through Chinese Buddhist translation. 5Tradition: East Asian esoteric Buddhism Learn More
Ba: The Siddham Letter
Ba is the voiced labial stop and the third letter of the labial class, differing from the head of the class by voicing alone. It carries the inherent short a, takes the full range of vowel marks, and enters conjuncts in the ordinary way.
Its distinguishing problem is not phonetic but graphic. In many Indic manuscript hands the letters for this sound and for the labial semivowel are drawn so alike that scribes confuse them, and the two sounds fell together in several of the languages written with these scripts, so the confusion entered by the ear as well as by the eye. Siddham shares the difficulty in full.
The consequence for anyone editing a text preserved in the script is that a manuscript reading of one letter is often an editorial decision about the other. Where a word is known from elsewhere the decision is easy; where it is a name, a technical term or a syllable from a dharani, it may not be recoverable at all, and a responsible edition marks the uncertainty rather than choosing silently.
The letter itself is unremarkable in the vocabulary, less frequent than most of the labial class, and its position in the table is fixed by voicing in the same way as the voiced stop in each of the other four classes.
Ba and Va: A Confusion Editors Inherit
The confusion of the two labial letters is one of the standing textual problems of Indian and Buddhist manuscript studies, and it runs across scripts rather than being particular to Siddham. It has two independent causes and they reinforce each other. The written shapes are close in many hands, so a copyist reading from an exemplar may misread. And in a number of the spoken languages of northern and eastern India the two sounds merged, so a copyist working from dictation, or writing a word he knew from speech, may write either.
Because the causes are independent, the error can enter at any point in a chain of copies and can enter more than once. Manuscripts of the same work regularly differ on exactly these letters, and the variant is so common that it is often not even reported in an apparatus.
For a dharani or a mantra the stakes are different from those in prose. A doctrinal sentence usually survives a wrong letter, because context restores it. A string of syllables transmitted for its sound has no context to restore it with, and a variant there cannot be resolved from sense. That is one of the reasons the East Asian tradition treated the Siddham original as worth keeping alongside the Chinese transcription: two independent witnesses to a sound are better than one, and they fail in different ways.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Shingon writes Sanskrit in Siddham and has done since the school was founded, keeping the script in use in Japan long after it had ceased to be written in India. The letters are studied as a set under the name shittan, and the contemplative practices attached to particular syllables are transmitted by initiation.
Tendai, the other Japanese school carrying an esoteric transmission, keeps the same letters in liturgical and inscriptional use. Siddham on a Japanese grave marker or a ritual implement may belong to either school, and the letters themselves are common to both.
Derived From
Siddham continues the Brahmi order letter for letter. The descent runs through the late Brahmi of the Gupta period and the Siddhamatrka hand that grows out of it, so this is a lineage rather than a direct copy of the older shape.
Originates in Language
The letter is named by its own Sanskrit sound and holds the place the Sanskrit phoneticians gave that sound in their analysis. Siddham was made to write this language, and the East Asian schools that preserved the script preserved it as a way of writing Sanskrit rather than adapting it to a local tongue.
Related To
The same letter of the same order in Devanagari. The two scripts are separate descendants of the same late Brahmi stock rather than one being taken from the other, which is why the sound value and the position agree while the shapes do not.
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