Tha and the Monogram Writing of Mantras

Ranjana has a compressed form used for writing mantras as a single interlocked figure rather than as a row of separate syllables, known as Kutakshar, in which the syllables are stacked and joined into one dense monogram. It is a display technique rather than a way of writing running text, and it belongs to the same impulse that made Ranjana the hand for covers, lintels and panels: the writing has to fill a shape and be recognised as a unit. Reading such a figure requires knowing what it says beforehand or being able to unpick the stacking, which is part of the point, since the form is meant to be looked at as an emblem as much as read as text. This is where the script's ornamental character and its liturgical use meet most directly, and it is also where an outsider's account should stop.

The syllables written in these figures belong to living practice, in Newar Buddhism and in the Tibetan traditions that took the script up as Lantsa, and their use is transmitted under initiation. What is public and describable is the writing: its shapes, its history and the technique by which a line of syllables is compressed into a single drawn form. The technique also explains why so much Ranjana survives on objects rather than in books. A compressed figure fits a seal, a medallion, a roof boss or the centre of a painting, and objects of that kind outlast paper.