The Word for Knowledge, and the Vocabulary of a Doctrine

Some letters and clusters carry a subject with them. The conjunct that opens the Sanskrit word for knowledge is one, because that word and its compounds run through the whole of Buddhist doctrinal writing: the knowledge that is the goal, the knowledge that is discriminating, the knowledge that is a perfection, the various technical terms built on the same root for kinds and stages of knowing.

The practical effect on a Siddham page is that certain shapes recur far above their frequency in the language at large. A doctrinal text uses a comparatively small technical vocabulary very heavily, so the clusters at the front of its key terms appear over and over, and a reader who recognises them can identify the subject of a page before construing a sentence of it. Scribes copying such material develop the same habit from the other side, and the shapes they write most fluently are these.

There is a caution attached. The recurrence of a term is not evidence of what it means in a given school, and the Buddhist traditions differ substantially on exactly these central words. The atlas records the vocabulary and its sources rather than resolving the disagreements, and where the schools take genuinely opposed positions on a term, that is a fact about the traditions and belongs in the record as one.