Palm Leaf, Paper and the Shape of a Written Line

Siddham was written on palm leaf in India and on paper in China and Japan, and the difference shows in the letters. A palm leaf is cut into a long narrow strip and written with a stylus or a reed, and the line of writing runs the length of it in a shallow band, so the script has to stay compact from top to bottom. The Brahmic scripts are built for exactly that. The vowel marks are small, they sit close to the letter, and a cluster of consonants stacks rather than spreading sideways.

Paper removed the constraint and the brush changed the stroke. A script drawn with a brush acquires modulation, thick where the brush presses and thin where it lifts, and the East Asian Siddham hands are recognisably brush hands in a way the Indian ones are not. The same letter written with a stylus on a leaf and with a brush on paper is the same letter and does not look the same, which is one of the reasons a palaeographer can place a page at all.

The oldest witnesses of the script survive because of this dependence on material. The temple of Horyuji in Nara holds palm-leaf manuscripts in Siddham that have long been described as among the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts anywhere, preserved not in the country that produced them but in the one that received them, because the climate and the institutions there happened to be kinder to a leaf than the ones the leaf came from.