The Script a Whole Philosophy Was Written In

Almost the entire textual inheritance of Kashmir Shaivism comes down in this script. The works of Abhinavagupta and his predecessors, the commentaries, the tantric literature of the region and a great many Sanskrit manuscripts of works composed elsewhere but preserved in Kashmir were copied in it, largely on birch bark, which the region supplied in quantity and which survives less well than palm leaf. That concentration means the script is a bottleneck. Editions of these texts depend on scholars who can read it, and manuscripts in it are held in collections whose catalogues were made by people with varying competence in the hand, so material can be present and effectively invisible.

Work on the region's philosophical tradition has repeatedly turned on someone reading a manuscript that had been catalogued without being understood. One much discussed manuscript is not philosophical at all. A birch bark mathematical text recovered in the northwest, written in a form of this script, contains material of considerable importance for the history of the zero, and its date has been argued over since radiocarbon results were published that gave widely separated readings for different leaves. The argument is unresolved.