Siddham Na 𑖡

Na is the dental nasal, closing the fourth class, and it is the commonest of the five nasals by a wide margin. It is also the only one that freely begins a Sanskrit word, so it is met as an independent letter constantly rather than only inside clusters, which is unusual among the nasals.

It is the source of most retroflex nasals in the language as well. A rule converts this letter into the retroflex nasal when certain sounds have occurred earlier in the same word, so a reader who sees the retroflex form is usually looking at what began as this one, and a scribe writing either has to know the rule.

In Buddhist vocabulary written in Siddham the letter is everywhere: in the negative prefix in its pre-vocalic form, in the words for name and for man, and in a long list of doctrinal terms. Its frequency puts it in the same class as the voiced dental stop for palaeographic purposes, among the letters whose form varies most between hands and therefore carries the most information about a page.

Its position at the close of the dental class is fixed by the same principle that governs the other four, each of which ends with the nasal made at its own point of articulation.

Its role as the source of the retroflex nasal gives it two written outcomes, and a reader working backwards from a page has to know which rule produced which. That is a small illustration of a general point about the script: what is written is the finished form, and recovering what went into it is grammar rather than recognition.

In East Asian Buddhism the copying of scripture is itself a practice, undertaken for merit and often dedicated to a particular purpose or person, and it was carried out on a scale that is difficult to overstate. Court-sponsored scriptoria produced canonical texts in quantity, private individuals commissioned copies, and the practice continues in Japan today under the name shakyo.

Most of that copying was of Chinese translations, in Chinese characters. Siddham enters where the untranslated material does, in the dharani and mantras embedded in the texts, in title pages and dedications, and in the sheets and charms produced for distribution, where a Sanskrit syllable might be the whole content.

The consequence for the script is that it was written by an enormous number of hands, many of them belonging to people who could not read it. A copyist reproducing a shape rather than a word makes a different class of error than one who knows what the shape says: the mistakes are visual rather than linguistic, and they compound across generations of copying, so a letter can drift a long way from its exemplar without anyone noticing.

That is one of the standing problems of the East Asian Siddham record, and it is also why the manuals and letter tables mattered so much: they were the correction against drift.