Dhamma written in ten different scripts

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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Paññāsikhara »

zavk wrote:Hmmmm..... it never occurred to me that Dhamma in Chinese is 正 法. That's very interesting. I've only known of Buddhism in Chinese as 佛 教 --- the first character signifies 'Buddha' or 'Bodhi' whilst the second character signifies 'teaching' or 'religion'. So 佛 教 really connotes something like 'Bodhi teaching' or the 'Buddha religion'. Read in this manner, 佛 教 has a certain specificity--and some might say, an institutionalism--about it.

正 法 on the other hand is much broader, like the word Dhamma (as opposed to Buddhism). The first character signifies: 'just (right); main; upright; straight; correct; principle'.

The Chinese script is pictorial in nature, and uses ideograms. So unlike English and other alphabet-based languages, ideograms are often combinations of different characters and can convey multiple meanings, often in poetic ways.

So looking at the character we can speculate on why it signifies 'just, upright, principle,' and so forth. It is is composed of five straight lines, each at a right angle to one another. There is a certain symmetry to the character. It reminds me of mandala patterns.

The second character signifies: 'law; method; way'.

is made up of two components. On the left are three strokes. These three strokes do not stand alone as a character themselves. But they are usually added to other characters as a kind of 'modification' to shift the meaning. The three strokes signify an association with water (although the three strokes themselves do not form the character for 'water'). When added to characters they suggest connotations of fluidity or smoothness.

To the right of the three strokes is which signifies: 'to go; to leave; to remove'. I'm trying to speculate on why this character signifies 'to go' and so forth. It occurred to me that it looks like the outline of a boat: it has a broad base and with a vertical line at the top that resembles a mast. So might connote a sense of being 'ferried across water' or 'that which moves fluidly'.

But this character when combined with other characters signify things as diverse as 'sleeve opening', 'to exercise', 'a pen (that which surrounds)'. So my reading of it as symbolizing a boat could be totally wrong.

Therefore we could say that 正 法 means something like 'the upright/principled/correct way (or law or method)'. And following my speculations about the character as connoting 'fluid ferrying', 正 法 then coincides with the Buddha's simile of the raft, which describes the Dhamma as the 'right teaching that takes one across the river, and which removes one from the shore of suffering and brings them to the shore of awakening.'

India and China are both ancient civilizations. It is likely that the word Dhamma and the Chinese characters that are later used to express Dhamma developed separately. If so, it is fascinating how when the Buddha's teaching eventually reached China, the languages (and thus modes of thinking) so readily support one another.

(BTW, I'm not an expert with the Chinese language. I am, in fact, pretty bad at it. But it is my cultural ancestry and I do have a decent grasp of these basic words. I am NOT trained in Chinese linguistics; these are just speculations on what little I know. Because of my interest in Chan/Zen, I've been curious about how Chinese characters can uniquely express the Dhamma in ways that the English language is unable to. Hopefully, you find this interesting too. :smile: )

EDIT: Just realised this is the Pali forum. This is not quite Pali... sorry.
Actually, 正法 is NOT the Chinese for "dhamma", but the Chinese for "saddhamma".
"dhamma" is just 法.

I think that any etymological analysis of this character in terms of the 氵 radical and 去 are just going to lead to a lot of confusion, as the meaning derived from the radicals and roots was already long since passed before Buddhism made it to China and they decided to use this word as a translation glyph.
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Paññāsikhara »

Bankei wrote: Hi David

Thanks for this list. Interesting. I just have 2 brief comments.

The Chinese, would be pronounced Zhenfa (Zhen means true and Fa means dhamma) in modern Mandarin, so I would say it is probably a translation rather than a transliteration into another script. On the hand it could have been a transliteration as the pronunciation of Chinese characters varies considerably from region to region and dialect to dialect. Da -ma could be the prounciation of the 2 characters in the western regions in 400AD.
"zheng", not "zhen". The meaning is more like "upright", "correct", than true. Maybe you are thinking of 真 which is pronounced "zhen", and also means "true" or "real". Actually, this second character may have been more accurate for the "sad-" in "saddharma", but they seldom used it, and preferred zheng 正 instead by a long way.
Though, as you say, this is just the modern Mandarin, which is usually somewhat different from the earlier dialects at the time of translation.

It is NOT a transliteration, but a translation of "sad-" for "saddharma", (and also "samyak", etc.).
For transliteration, often 達摩 or similar is used.
The Japanese is just a transliteration though, Daruma.
And I believe the Japanese just more commonly use the Kanji as shown above.
The use of transliterated Indic forms is most probably a modern thing, maybe scholastic.
And you write the language of the Asokan inscriptions was Pali (and in another post in reply to another question of mine). I have never heard this before. Asoka write a large number of edicts in a variety of languages - some even bilingual and one of 2 in Greek I believe, but I have never heard of any being in Pali. Prof K.R. Norman writes that he thinks the scribes wrote in, and translated into, the local dialect of the region. Do you have a source for Pali edicts?

It is also interesting to note that new Asokan edicts or fragments are still being discovered, with one as recent as 1989 at Sannati.

Bankei
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by DNS »

Thanks venerable! :bow:

It is good to have so many linguistic experts here!
Bankei
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Bankei »

Hi Ven

Yes you were right, I did confuse Zheng and Zhen - I am a bit rusty.

In Japanese 達摩 would refer to the Chinese Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma which is would be pronounced Daruma, same as the David's transliteration above. Think it is Tamo in Chinese.

However the characters in Japan would be slightly different (the second one), 達磨.

Thanks

Bankei
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Paññāsikhara »

Bankei wrote:Hi Ven

Yes you were right, I did confuse Zheng and Zhen - I am a bit rusty.

In Japanese 達摩 would refer to the Chinese Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma which is would be pronounced Daruma, same as the David's transliteration above. Think it is Tamo in Chinese.

However the characters in Japan would be slightly different (the second one), 達磨.

Thanks

Bankei
For 達摩 and 達磨, these two are basically interchangable, it is just a transliteration after all, and they are phonetically identical (or at least extremely similar).
There are plenty of examples where either form could be Bodhidharma or just Dharma. And there are other forms too.
The main difference is from the period when the writing is done. Both these two are more early-ish forms. But later, particularly with Tantric texts during the Tang, which contained a lot of transliteration, there is a great proliferation of transliteration variants.
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Unicode and touching letters in Sinhala

Post by jsv »

Chula wrote:especially since Unicode doesn't support this as far as I know
Unicode itself does support this already, but most applications still don't.

Here are some Unicode strings for you to test:
Dhamma: ධම‍්ම
Buddha: බුද‍්ධ
sakyaputto: සක්‍යපුත‍්තො

On my linux machine I can see touching letters rendered correctly, but only using Iskoola Pota font and only in Firefox 3 and applications that use Pango rendering engine (that is, Gnome applications). And the picture in my previous post was made with XeLaTeX.
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Chula »

Thanks jsv - good to know. It renders fine on Google Chrome. I'm still not clear on how to type that though..
When I do a "හල් කිරීම" after a ම and type another ම, I get ධම්ම. The link doesn't seem to clarify - not a big deal though.
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by DNS »

The last two posts with the fonts did not show for me at all, just boxes in Firefox or IE. Guess I need to finally download Google Chrome.
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Paññāsikhara »

I'm with Chrome, but it doesn't come out, either.
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by seanpdx »

Most applications these days do not use built-in fonts, so regardless of the application you are using, you still need a font that actually has those particular characters. The two posts in question work fine for me, in Firefox3 under Windows. I'm guessing they would show up fine for me in Firefox on my linux box, also. But I've installed a lot of foreign-character fonts for languages in theravadin countries on both my boxes. Before rushing out and installing new software, look for some fonts to install.
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by vinodh »

I'm with Chrome, but it doesn't come out, either.
You guys have to update your Uniscribe Engine to enable Sinhala. The Govt. of Sri Lanka have published such Sinhala enabling packs which install Sinhala Fonts, and update the Uniscribe Engine automatically.

http://si.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... Font_Guide" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.virtualvinodh.com

Buddhists Texts in Brahmi Script : http://www.virtualvinodh.com/brahmi-lipitva

yo dharmaṁ paśyati, sa buddhaṁ paśyati
One who sees the Dharma, sees the Buddha

na pudgalo na ca skandhā buddho jñānamanāsravam
sadāśāntiṁ vibhāvitvā gacchāmi śaraṇaṁ hyaham

Neither a person nor the aggregates, the Buddha, is knowledge free from [evil] outflows
Clearly perceiving [him] to be eternally serene, I go for refuge [in him]
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by vinodh »

Chula wrote:Thanks jsv - good to know. It renders fine on Google Chrome. I'm still not clear on how to type that though..
When I do a "හල් කිරීම" after a ම and type another ම, I get ධම්ම. The link doesn't seem to clarify - not a big deal though.
You have to use ZWJ to achieve it.

ma + zwj + al lakuna + ma - Touch ma-ma ;

btw

Chula I have a doubt. In Sri Lanka, do they still use Old style-conjuncts to write Pali or have all switched to the modern non-conjunct based orthography ?

Also,

When writing Pali, do they use short short-o/e or long o/e to represent the Pali o/e ?

(e.g) which is the correct convention ?

(i) නමෝ තස්ස භගවතෝ අරහතෝ (or)

(ii) නමො තස්ස භගවතො අරහතො

Coz.. http://pali.pratyeka.org/PaliRosettaStone.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; says.... sinhala short e/o as the equivalent of pali e/o. But on Googling (i) gives much more hits or than (ii)

V
http://www.virtualvinodh.com

Buddhists Texts in Brahmi Script : http://www.virtualvinodh.com/brahmi-lipitva

yo dharmaṁ paśyati, sa buddhaṁ paśyati
One who sees the Dharma, sees the Buddha

na pudgalo na ca skandhā buddho jñānamanāsravam
sadāśāntiṁ vibhāvitvā gacchāmi śaraṇaṁ hyaham

Neither a person nor the aggregates, the Buddha, is knowledge free from [evil] outflows
Clearly perceiving [him] to be eternally serene, I go for refuge [in him]
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by DNS »

vinodh wrote:
I'm with Chrome, but it doesn't come out, either.
You guys have to update your Uniscribe Engine to enable Sinhala. The Govt. of Sri Lanka have published such Sinhala enabling packs which install Sinhala Fonts, and update the Uniscribe Engine automatically.
Ah, yes, you are correct. I am on my laptop now and I see it fine. I just need to install the Sinhala fonts on my desktop so that I can see it there too, when using that computer. :thanks:
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by Kokoro »

If I may add Greek to the list...

Δαμμα

And if I may make one small correction: the Japanese kana ダルマ reads "daruma." Dhamma (or damma, as it would be pronounced in Japanese) would be written as ダッマ. The small ツ represents the doubling of the "m" and a dash (ー) could be added to prolong the first or second "a" (or both) if either or both vowels are meant to be prolonged.

As a language lover myself I loved seeing the various ways "Dhamma" could be written. I'd like to see how many more scripts could be used. :smile:

:anjali:
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Re: Dhamma written in ten different scripts

Post by DNS »

Kokoro wrote:If I may add Greek to the list...

Δαμμα
:thanks:
And if I may make one small correction: the Japanese kana ダルマ reads "daruma." Dhamma (or damma, as it would be pronounced in Japanese) would be written as ダッマ. The small ツ represents the doubling of the "m" and a dash (ー) could be added to prolong the first or second "a" (or both) if either or both vowels are meant to be prolonged.
:thanks: for that too.
As a language lover myself I loved seeing the various ways "Dhamma" could be written. I'd like to see how many more scripts could be used. :smile:
:thumbsup:
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