Ja and the Manuscripts of the Valley

The Kathmandu Valley matters to the study of Buddhism out of proportion to its size, because Newar communities there continued to copy and preserve Sanskrit Mahayana texts through periods when the same material became scarce or disappeared elsewhere in South Asia. Manuscripts survived on palm leaf and later on paper, kept in monastic and household collections, recopied when they decayed, and it is from that tradition that a considerable body of Sanskrit Buddhist literature is known at all. Ranjana belongs to this history as the formal hand of it. It is the script of title lines and headings, of mantras set apart from the running text, of dedications and covers, while the body of a manuscript was frequently written in a plainer hand of the Valley.

Understanding that division prevents a common error, which is to imagine every Newar Buddhist manuscript as a page of Ranjana. The truth is more interesting, because it shows a community using more than one script deliberately and choosing between them by register, in the way a printer chooses between a display face and a text face rather than in the way a person chooses a favourite. The manuscripts also carry the evidence for the script's own history. Dated colophons and the styles of successive hands are how the development of Ranjana is traced at all, so the tradition of copying is both the reason the texts survive and the reason the script can be studied.