Artist Statement
" Siddham"

In every culture in which it appeared, writing has been considered something magical. Letters and characters have been used to form words and sentences, to do business, to govern, to conduct love affairs - in short to communicate meaning to other human beings. But letters have also been thought to have the power to communicate with unseen energies and beings, and to contain in their very shapes, and in the act of writing them, the kernel of these energies. This was true of Hebrew letters, Greek and then Roman letters - all these alphabets have esoteric meanings as well as their usual significance - and it was certainly true of Sanskrit, where the very name of the principle alphabet - Devanagari - means “gift from the city of the gods.”

The letters written here are in the Siddham script, an ancient variant of Devanagari. “Siddham” means “perfected” and the letters were used chiefly for writing religious texts: short sutras, dharanis, mantras, and seed syllables. This seems to have been especially true during the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries AD, when Chinese pilgrims began arriving in the great Indian Buddhist universities. This same period saw the rise of tantric, or esoteric, Buddhism, in which many of the meditations incorporate the use of seed syllables.The idea that a written or spoken word could allude to, invoke, or contain the essence of an energy - or for that matter, a particular Buddha or bodhisattva - was not difficult for a literate Chinese person, given the pictographic nature of Chinese writing. Siddham was taken back to China and propagated there by tantric adepts, the renown Amoghavajra principal among them.

As a mystical system of writing, Siddham came into full flower in the 9th and 10th centuries in Japan, in the Tendai, and especially in the Shingon schools of esoteric (or tantric) Buddhism. Here, entire pantheons of Buddhas and their spiritual families would be elaborately arranged in mandalas, represented only by bija (seed syllables) instead of more graphic painted portraits. The letters on display here follow models written by thegreatest of the Shingon calligraphers, Chozen and Yuzan.

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