Journal of the American Oriental Society Volume 110 issue 2 1990 [doi 10.2307%2F604529] Salomon,...

8/22/2019 Journal of the American Oriental Society Volume 110 issue 2 1990 [doi 10.2307%2F604529] Salomon, Richard -- N

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New Evidence for a Gndhr Origin of the Arapacana Syllabary

Author(s): Richard SalomonReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1990), pp. 255-273Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604529 .

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NEW EVIDENCE FOR A GANDHARI ORIGINOF THE ARAPACANA SYLLABARY1RICHARD SALOMON

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

The Arapacana syllabary appears in many Buddhist texts in Sanskrit and other languages inplace of the normal Sanskrit varnamald. Unlike the standard system, the Arapacana does notfollow any apparent phonetic sequence, and is incomplete, lacking several of the simple vowelsand consonants. It also includes several conjunct consonants which are not part of the normalsystem. Several theories have been proposed as to the origin, nature and purpose of this peculiarsystem. As for the question of the geographical and linguistic origins of the Arapacana, withwhich this paper is mainly concerned, the most widely held theory has been that of Konow, whothought that the Arapacana was invented in central Asia. A re-examination of this question,however, shows that it must have originally been formulated in the region of Gandhdra (in themodern North West Frontier Province of Pakistan) and in the GandhirT (Prakrit) language andKharosthT cript, as has been suggested by F. W. Thomas and others. This is established on thebasis of both epigraphical evidence, in the form of four occurrences (three of them previouslyunrecognized) of the Arapacana in Kharosthl documents, and of internal evidence such as thedistribution of the characters, particularly the consonant conjuncts, which reflects phonetic andgraphic characteristicsof an underlying GindhArT Kharosthl original.

I. THEARAPACANAYLLABARYIN BUDDHISTTRADITION

THE ARAPACANA YLLABARY,he so-called "mysticalalphabet of the Buddhists," which derives its namefrom its first five letters (a ra pa ca na), is widespreadin Buddhist tradition, being attested in numeroustexts and other sources in several languages. It occurs,among other places, in several texts of the Prajid-pdramitd class, both in the Sanskrit originals and inChinese and Tibetan translations (Levi 1929, 102-3;Conze 1978, 3; Lamotte 1976, 1867, n. 3), as well as inthe Ganidavyuihasection of the Avatamsaka (Levi1929, 103; Thomas 1950, 199) and in the Chinesetranslation of the Dharmaguptakavinaya (Levi 1915,440; Lamotte 1958, 549; also in the MWasarvdstivdda-vinaya according to Thomas 1950, 199). An adapta-

tion of the Arapacana is also found in the KhotaneseBook of Zambasta (Konow 1933, 16-17; Emmerick1968, 120-21 and 454-55) 2 Moreover, as shown byBrough (1977), the earliest Chinese translation of theLalitavistara includes a list of words which wereevidently arranged in the Indic original in the Arapa-cana order (see below, and part VI). In later tra-ditions, "Arapacana" is personified as a form ofMan-juiff(Lamotte 1958, 550; Malalasekere 1966, 67-70; Bhattacharyya 1968, 120-21 and fig. 89).3 InTibet, the popular mantra arapacanadhi is associatedwith Man-juirl Waddell 1934, 151), and is often foundinscribed on stones.

l I wish to thank my colleague, Prof. Collett Cox, forreading and discussing this paper with me at some length, aswell as for providing several helpful comments and refer-ences. I am also grateful to the Department of AsianLanguages and Literature of the University of Washingtonfor helping to meet the costs involved in preparing thispaper.

2 Some Khotanese texts (also available in Tibetan andChinese versions) contain a mnemonic sequence of eightsyllables, pa, la, ba, ka, ja, dha, sa, and ksa, which appearsto be an abridgement of the Arapacana; these syllables arenumbers 3, 6, 8, 15, 20, 22, 23, and 25 of the Arapacana.This sequence appears in the Khotanese Anantamukha-dharanr(Bailey 1963, 103) and "Book of Vimalakirti" (Bailey1951, 108-9). I am indebted to Oktor Skjaervo for bringingthis point to my attention.

3 For a remarkable inscribed bronze statue of Arapacanaand associated deities, see Banerjee 1947.

255

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256 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)In its usual form the Arapacana alphabet consistsof 42 syllables,4 arrangedas follows (variants' given inparentheses):

1. A 15. KA 29. BHA2. RA 16. SA 30. CHA3. PA 17. MA 31. SMA4. CA 18. GA 32. HVA5. NA 19.THA 33. TSA (STA)6. LA 20. JA 34. GHA7. DA 21. SVA (SVA) 35. THA8. BA 22. DHA 36. NA9. DA 23. SA 37. PHA10. SA 24. KHA 38. SKA11. VA 25. KSA 39. YSA12. TA 26. STA 40. SCA13. YA 27. JNA 41. TA14. STA 28. RTHA (HA, 42. DHA (STA)PHAITA)

It is obvious that the Arapacana is not really an"alphabet" in the sense that the standard Sanskritvarnamdld is; that is to say, it does not constitute acomplete list of sounds or letters in a logical phoneticorder. Several of the syllables of the standard Indianalphabet are missing (cf. Levi 1929, 102): all thevowels except a, and the consonants fi, #1,h, and ha(though this latter does occur as a variant of no. 28according to Uvi; cf. also Thomas 1950, 201). Nordoes the syllabary follow any discernible phoneticorder, beyond the first letter a; this, in contrast to thestandard Indic alphabet which is arranged accordingto strict phonetic principles. Finally, the alphabetincludes twelve conjunct consonants, which are notincluded at all in the standard alphabet (except forksa andjfia which are sometimes added at the end byway of special ligatures); and the selection and order-ing of these twelve conjuncts also do not follow anyclear phonetic principle (more on this point below,and in part V).In many of the texts in which they occur, the lettersof the Arapacana alphabet are treated as abbrevia-tions of key words illustrating fundamental points ofBuddhist doctrine. Thus for example in the Parca-vimsvatisahasrikaPraqjfipdramitdDutt 1934, 212) weread:

akaro mukhah sarvadharmdndmddyanutpannavat /repho mukhah sarvadharmdndmrajopagatatvdt /pakdro mukhahsarvadharmdndm aramdrthanirdeSt /cakdro mukhah sarvadharmandm cyavanopapattya-

nupalabdhitvat /The letter a is the head of all the dharmas, because

they are unproduced in the beginning.The letter ra is the head of all the dharmas, because

they are freed of impurity.The letter pa. . . because of the expounding of the

ultimate truth.The letter ca. . . because of the non-apprehension

of decease and rebirth,and so on.Since the selection and ordering of the syllables ofthe Arapacana are evidently not based on phonetic orlinguistic principles, it has been suggested (first byThomas 1950, 197) that the alphabet arose as some-thing along the lines of a mnemonic device, whereineach aksara represented a major point of doctrine;that is to say, the illustrative words came first, and thealphabet was derived therefrom, rather than viceversa. This hypothesis, however, raises certain prob-lems (as noted by Thomas), among them the fact thatno text which might have served as a prototype ofsuch a list has yet been identified. Moreover, thespecific terms connected with each syllable vary con-siderably in the differenttexts in which the Arapacanaoccurs; and in the Gandavyuiha, hey are not phoneti-cally related to the syllables at all.Despite these doubts, the mnemonic theory wasrefined by Brough (1977) in his important article onthe Arapacana in the Chinese Lalitavistara. In thispaper Brough examines the treatment in the olderChinese translation, that of Dharmaraksa made in308 A.D., of the lipigdldsamdarsana episode, whereinthe future Buddha visits a schoolroom and shows hisknowledge of 64 scripts, and causes his 10,000 fellowstudents to produce an explanatory phrase for eachletter of the alphabet. In the extant Sanskrit and inthe later Chinese translation of Divakara (683 A.D.)the order of the syllables is that of the standardSanskrit varnamald; but Brough shows beyond anydoubt that the Chinese head words in the old ChineseLalitavistara reflect an Indian original wherein theillustrative words follow the Arapacana order. More-over, he points out (p. 94) that this text, unlike allothers containing the Arapacana, had only headwords, without any initial syllables. He thereforeoffers the "conjecture"that Arapacana arose from "alist of head-words" which "might have been in origin

4 For variants with 43 or even 44 syllables, see below,part II.

5 For the variants see Levi 1929, 102 and Thomas 1950,200-204.



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SALOMON: New Evidencefor a GdndhdrrOrigin of the Arapacana Syllabary 257a mnemonic device to fix the order of the verses orparagraphs of some important text, by taking the firstword of each. Thereafter, the mnemonic would havebeen further reduced to initial syllables." An explana-tion along these lines, Brough further points out,would explain several of the peculiarities of thealphabet, including the absence of several of the basicletters, and especially the inclusion, seemingly atrandom, of a dozen conjuncts. Brough further explainsthe peculiarities that several of the conjuncts are ofthe type which would never or rarely occur in initialposition (rtha, tsa, sca), and that the greater numberof conjuncts appear in the latter part of the alphabet,on the grounds that these might have been the secondaksara of the key words, selected in the mnemonicbecause the first aksara had already been used. Forinstance RTHA (no. 28) might have been used torepresent the word artha because a had already beenused at the beginning of the mnemonic sequence.Although the original text cannot be identified,since in Brough's words (ibid.) "the variations in thekey-words between the sources are too many toenable us to reconstitute an original list of head-words," his hypothesis is certainly the most plausibleoffered to date as to the technical origin of theArapacana syllabary. More controversial, however, isthe question of the historical circumstances: that is,the date, place, and sectarian and linguistic connec-tions of its origins. This issue was first raised by Levi(1929, 107-8), who noted that the syllable YSA(no. 39) was used in BrahmT oin legends in the Sakaperiod of Indian history (approximately the first cen-turies B.C. and A.D.) to reproduce an Iranian z in thename of Ysamotika on the coins of his son, theWestern Ksatrapa king Castana (late first and earlysecond centuriesA.D.).6 He thus asks (p. 108), "L'alpha-bet mystique du bouddhisme est-il n&au Cachemir ouai UjjayinTi?Ou vient-il de plus loin encore versl'Ouest, des pays limitrophes?"Though Levi declinesto express a final opinion on the question, he also

notes the strong traditional connection of the Arapa-cana alphabet with ManhjugrT,or whom he posits"une origine serindienne."The question of the Arapacana's geographical ori-gin was further taken up by Konow (1933), who notedthat the word jard, 'old age', which is used in thePanicavims'atikdPrajiidpdramita as the illustration ofthe Arapacana syllable YSA, is normally spelled ysarain the Saka language of Khotan. This led him toconclude (p. 15) that the Arapacana was formulatedby or among speakers of the Saka language usingSanskrit as their "chief sacred language," on thegrounds that "the principle [of the Pahcavimsatika] isto explain the aksharas by means of Sanskrit words";that is to say, that the syllabary was originally formu-lated in Sanskrit but under the influence of Sakalanguage and orthography. Konow also drew atten-tion to the appearance of Castana, the son of Ysamo-tika, in central Asian legends, preserved in Uighurtranslation. Konow cited this is as establishing acultural connection between the Khotan region ofcentral Asia and western India, by way of the com-mon ethnic background of the Saka rulers, andconcluded that the occurrence of the syllable ysa inBrahmTrecords of western India reflects a borrowingof a Saka / central Asian orthographical device (p. 20)into India, rather than the other way around. He thusdecided that the Arapacana alphabet was not onlyused in Khotan (as proven by the Khotanese textreferred to above) but may have actually originatedthere and spread into India.7Konow's hypothesis of a central Asian origin forthe Arapacana has been accepted in many circles(note especially, and influentially, Lamotte 1958, 549:"l'alphabet sur lequel elle est basee n'est pas l'alphabetindien, mais l'alphabet sace ou khotanaise"); but thereare several problems with the theory. For one thing, itgoes against the general direction of cultural trends inthis period, i.e., of Indian influence on central Asiarather than the other way around. Secondly, there arechronological problems, which Konow addressed butfailed to solve convincingly, with his attempts to datethe Saka orthographical device ysa = za as early asThe same spelling is found in the coins of Damaysada /

Damajada(grl) I, Castana's great-grandson (Rapson 1908,cxxii), and in inscriptions of Castana's successors as notedby Konow (1933, 14); and in the British Museum seal ofAvariysa (Sircar 1965-66, 278-79). In both cases, the con-junct consonant in question was previously read as ghsa(Ddmaghsada, Avarighsa), due to the similarity of the lettersfor ya and gha in the BrahmT cript of this period. But thereading ysa is almost certainly the correct one, as shown,among other things, by the evidence of the Arapacana ysa aspreserved in later texts. (See also LUders 1940, 236-39.)

7 Konow concluded (1933, 24) that "[s]uch indicationsseem to support Professor Uvi's view that the Arapacanaalphabet may have been devised in Eastern Turkestan."But actually Levi (1929) goes no further than to obliquelyhint at such a possibility, and thus Thomas (1950, 206)is more accurate in referring to "Levi's hint [my italics] thatthe Arapacana alphabet may have originated in ChineseTurkestan."



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258 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)the first century A.D. Thirdly, his assumption that theSanskrit illustrative words prove that the originalsyllabary itself was composed in Sanskrit is notnecessarily justified. And finally, he dismissed therelevance of matters of Kharosthi orthography to theArapacana question, on the grounds (p. 14) that "theaksara ysa has never been found in Kharosth-i";actually, as will be shown below, the presence of thissyllable is one of the chief clues that KharosthTdoesunderlie the Arapacana as preserved in BuddhistSanskrit texts.Further problems with Konow's treatment wereraised by Thomas (1950), who disputed Konow'sarguments based on the Saka orthography ysa, ex-plaining (p. 206) that the choice of Jara as theillustrative word "does not imply a knowledge of theSaka-KhotanT word ysara = Sanskrit jard."8 He alsorightly criticized (ibid.) Konow's explanation of SCA(no. 40) as "an older form or a corruption of Sakatea" (Konow 1933, 19) as "unmaintainable." Thomastherefore concluded (p. 207) that "it is highly improb-able that the Prajiid-pdramitd should contain anyelements of Central Asian speech or script; and wemust be content with LEvi's statement that the alpha-bet was constituted in a region of India, viz. thenorth-west or west, where through Saka rule theaksara YSA had become familiar as representingIranian z."9Thomas' opinion that the Arapacana alphabet orig-inated in India proper, rather than in central Asia,was endorsed by Conze (1975, 22), who thinks that "ittook its present shape in the North West corner ofIndia." If this is correct, we can look for clues to itsorigin in the Prakrit Gandhari language of this regionand in the KharosthT cript which was invariably usedto record this language;and the strikingand distinctivephonetic and morphological peculiarities of this dialectmay be expected to leave discernible traces. The

crucial role that this language played in the develop-ment and expansion of Buddhism in the Saka-Kusanaperiod of the early centuries of the Christian era isstill being investigated, and looms larger and largerwith each new discovery. Thus a Gandhari role in theorigin of the Arapacana syllabary would not be out ofline with the current trend of Buddhist historicalstudies. This Gandhari theory does in fact find at leastpartial support from Brough, who showed (1977, 94)that the old Chinese Lalitavistara containing words inthe Arapacana order "was translated from a Gandhariversion." Brough nevertheless concluded that otherevidence (discussed below in part VI) "strongly sug-gests that Gandhari was not the language of theearliest form of the syllabary. In short, the origin ofthe Arapacana is still a mystery, and will remain sounless some unexpected additional evidence comes tolight in the future."

In the following sections of this paper I will discussjust such additional evidence in the form of four earlydocuments, all in Kharosthi script, containing por-tions of the Arapacana. The first such piece of evi-dence, a KharosthT nscription from Takht-i-bahT,wasfirst published only recently, and not recognized ascontaining the Arapacana. The second and third, theKharosthT inscriptions in the Lahore and Peshawarmuseums, have been known for many years, but alsowere never recognized as Arapacana syllabaries. Onlythe fourth document, identified by Thomas 1950 as aportion of the Arapacana on a wooden tablet fromcentral Asia, was known to Brough et al., though notin a completely reliable edition (see n. 17). Thecombined weight of these four documents will lendstrong support to Levi's and Thomas' hypothesis of anorthwestern (and hence Gandhari) origin, Brough'shesitation on the point notwithstanding.

II. THE ARAPACANA ALPHABET INA KHAROSTHI INSCRIPTION

Mukherjee 1984 published a new inscription fromthe British Museum, which he read as follows:1. abate2. rad(r)a (or rada)3. pa'om4. chama'im5. na6. e7. dana8. ba

8 I have already alluded above to the inherent problemsinvolved in attempting to discern the origins of the Arapa-cana itself from an examination of the key or illustrativewords associated with its letters, as the words are of ques-tionable significance and authenticity. As will be explainedbelow, examinations on the basis of documentary evidenceand of the internal structure of the alphabet itself are morereliable and more revealing.

9 It should be noted that Thomas reached this conclusiondespite the fact the document which is the subject of hispaper, namely the fragment of the Arapacana in Kharosthi(discussed further in part IV of this paper), is a central Asianrelic.



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SALOMON:New Evidencefor a Gdndhiri Origin of the Arapacana Syllabary 259While Mukherjeedeclined to give a complete transla-tion of the inscription, which he referredto (p. 18) as"an enigmatic as well as interesting Kharosthl docu-ment," he expressed the opinion that "the epigraphrecords the gift [dana, 1. 7] of a cistern or waterreservoir [pal'm, 1. 3] for the exclusive use of theweaker section of the society or civil population orwomen-folk [abale, 1.1]."Through the kind assistance of Wladimir Zwalf ofthe British Museum, I have obtained a photograph(fig. 1) and an eye-copy of the inscription. Theinscription is written on the back of a Gandharanrelief illustrated in fig. 2, now kept in the BritishMuseum (registration no. 1900.4-14.13), and orig-inally from the important Buddhist monastery site ofTakht-i-BahT 0 near Marddn in the North West Fron-tier Province of Pakistan."1 The piece is tentativelyidentified as the 'Presentation of the bride to Sid-dhartha' (Marshall 1960, 34 and plate 27, fig. 41;Hallade 1968, 15, pl. 4). The inscribed rear surface ofthe stone measures 5 1/2 by 13 1/2 inches (14 by 34cm). The letters are 3/4 to 1 inch in height, while thenumericalfiguresare 1/4 to 3/8 inches high.

Regarding the date of the inscription Mukherjee(1984, 16) says, "Palaeographically it can be dated tothe lst-2nd century A.D.," and I am inclined to agreewith this estimate. The form of ca, for instance, withthe head stroke written as a diagonal line runningfrom upper left to lower right, is typical of inscrip-tions of the period of the great Kusanas, whichaccording to the most generally accepted chronologywould fall within this period. The relief on the rear ofwhich the inscription is written is included by Mar-shall (1960, 34) among the pieces representing "TheChildhood of Gandhara Art." Although he offers nospecific estimate for its date, his comments wouldpoint toward the same general period, and we wouldtherefore be reasonably safe in attributingthe inscrip-tion to the early centuries A.D., assuming that it ismore or less contemporaneous with the sculpture. Inany case it can hardly be later, as the rear surface onwhich it is inscribed would have been inaccessibleonce the relief was completed and fixed in place.I read the inscription as follows:

1. a ba le2. ra (bra or da?)

3. pa im4. ca ma im5. na6. la7. da (pa?) (dra?)8. ba

l

Fi. 1. Inscription on the rear of a relief from Takht-ibhl. (Photograph courtesy of the BritishMuseum.)

10 For descriptions of the site and relics found there, seeSpooner 1907-8 and 1910, 62-78.

" The placement of the inscription on the back of aGandharanrelief was not noted by Mukherjee.



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260 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)

Fig. 2. Front of the Takht-i-bahl relief: Presentation of the bride to Siddhdrtha (?). (Photograph courtesy of theBritish Museum.)

At the upper left side of the inscription, next to lines 1and 2, are four sets of numerical figures, which I readas does Mukherjee:1. 20 20 4 [=44]2. 10 1 [=11]3. 4 1 1 [=6]4. 4 4 1 [=9]

The readings of all the numbers are clear, as are mostof the letters except those given in parentheses. Thesecond letter in 1. 2 looks very much like the characterread as ba in lines 1 and 8, except for a diagonalstroke at the lower right. This syllable could beinterpreted as b with an r diacritic, i.e., bra, or as acursively written da with a diacritic of uncertainphonetic force, i.e., da, such as is found frequently inthe central Asian KharosthTdocuments and occasion-ally in Indian inscriptions (e.g., in the Wardak vaseinscription, Konow 1929, 170, 1. 1: ga4[r]ig[r]ena);but the shape of the character in question is notexactly like the usual form of either of these letters.The second letter in 1. 7 resembles a pa with the righthand vertical extended downwards; the line connectingthe two verticals is faint in the photograph, but isclear in Zwalf's eye-copy, as well as on the original(which I was able to examine, once again with Zwalf'sassistance, in August 1987). The third character in thesame line looks somewhat like a dra tilted 450 counter-clockwise. The vertical line after ba in 1. 8 seems to bemerely an extraneous mark. There are also a few

other stray marks lightly engraved elsewhere on thestone and faintly visible in the photograph whichresemble Kharosthl aksaras, for example, what lookslike a pa near the right edge on a level with line 6; butthese do not appear to be significant.These revised readings, however, do not provideany more of a satisfactory text than Mukherjee's, atleast when readin the conventional Kharosthlfashion,that is from right to left; only 1.1 gives a plausibleword, abale. The arrangement in eight lines of onlyone to three characters each, moreover, is most un-usual, especially since it is clearly not dictated bylimitations of space on the stone. It occurred to me,therefore, to try reading the inscription, not in theusual horizontal fashion, but vertically, from top tobottom. Reading the initial letter of each line in thisway provides the following interesting result for thefirst column:a ra pa ca na la da ba

This sequence of eight charactersagrees precisely withthe beginning of the Arapacana alphabet.But continuing to read the second letters of eachline in the same vertical fashion, we have:ba (bra or ia?) im ma (pa?)

This sequence does not correspond to the normalorder of the Arapacana, whose ninth through thir-teenth letters are DA, SA, VA, TA, and YA (see



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SALOMON: New Evidence for a Gdndhdri Origin of the Arapacana Syllabary 261above, part I). The first letter in the second columnrepeats the last of the first column. The next letter, ifda is the correct reading, would be the next (i.e.,ninth) letter of Arapacana (except for the additionaldiacritic). The following im, however, does not fit atall in Arapacana, which includes no vowels except fora at the beginning; and ma would be out of place, as itis the seventeenth letter of Arapacana. Likewise theother im in 1.4 (third character), and the uncertainletters in 1. 7 do not correspond in any discerniblewaywith the Arapacana arrangement. Nor do the lettersin the second column have any evident connectionwith the key words given in various Buddhist texts foreach aksara of the Arapacana alphabet (e.g., a = ddy-anutpannatvdt, ra = rajo)9agatatvdt, etc.).The significance of the numerical figures at the leftside of the inscription is equally obscure. The total of44 for the first figure is tantalizingly close to the usualtotal number of letters, 42, in the Arapacana alpha-bet. Moreover, some texts give a total of 43 letters,which Conze (1978, 3, n. 1) believes may be genuine;and Thomas (1950, 203) even records an example with44 letters, but dismisses it as erroneous. The numeral44 thus could conceivably refer to the total number ofletters in a variant form of the Arapacana alphabet,even though the classical formulation usually has 42letters. For the other three numerals, 11, 6, and 9,however, I am unable to propose any explanation, asthey do not seem to correspond to any significantsubdivisions or other grouping of the Arapacana.Lamotte (1976, 1868, n. 3), notes that certain textsattribute a special significance to the first 16 letters,but this does not clarify the matter at hand; thesecond and third numbers total 17, which mightconceivably have some relation to this system, but thematter is obviously problematic.There are, therefore, admittedly problems with con-sidering the inscription as a specimen of the Arapa-cana alphabet pure and simple. Nevertheless, theagreement of the initial letters of each line with thefirst eight letters of the Arapacana can hardly beinsignificant, as the chances of this occurring coin-cidentally would be exceedingly small. The verticalarrangement of the aksaras, while certainlyunusual, isalso not wholly without parallels. (For other examplesof vertical writing in special calligraphic or quasi-ritualistic contexts, see Salomon 1980, 45.) Giventhese points, and keeping in mind the prominence ofthe Arapacana alphabet in Buddhist tradition as awhole, I am strongly inclined to assume that theinscription is in some way connected with it, and mustrepresent a partial citation of it.But if we do in fact have in this inscription a partialrepresentation of the Arapacana alphabet, it remains

to be explained what the significance of its use theremight be, particularlyin view of its unusual positionon the reverse of a narrative relief. The most obviousexplanation would be that the inscription of thesacred alphabet represents something along the linesof a magical charm. On the one hand, this theorywould have the advantage of explaining its positionon the back of the relief, where it would be per-manently concealed; for the practice of ritual orquasi-ritual inscriptions being placed in invisible loca-tions in order to produce spiritual merit for theinscriber or donor is well attested among Kharosthlinscriptions (see, e.g., Konow 1929, 31). But on theother hand, such a theory still leaves unexplained theproblem of the aksaras in the second and thirdvertical lines, which do not agree with the Arapacanaordering, as well as the mysterious numbers at the leftside.

A second possibility is that the inscription on theback of the stone is something more in the nature ofan idle graffito, perhaps inscribed by a monk orstudent who had studied, or was studying, the Arapa-cana alphabet. (Such an impression is strengthenedbythe occurrence of what appear to be other stray letterslightly scratched on the edges of the stone.) Theproblematic aksaras of the second and third columnsmight then be dismissed as due to the inscriber'signorance of the full alphabet, or as some idle oridiosyncratic letter-play on the basis of the Arapa-cana; or even as some otherwise unknown variant orexpansion of it. But this explanation too is less thantotally satisfactory, especially in view of the generallyconsistent form of Arapacana as attested in diversesources and places in the Buddhist world; such varia-tions as are attested are generally minor and oftenattributable to textual corruption (see below, part IV);none of them even remotely resembles what we find inthe second and third columns of the new inscription.We may therefore propose a third explanationalong entirely different lines. We need not automati-cally assume that the letters on the back of the reliefhad a mystical rather than a practical purpose. It is atleast conceivable that they had to do, not withritualistic incantations, but rather with such a mun-dane matter as the location of the stone in theconstruction of the monument-presumably a stupa-on which it originally stood at Takht-i-bahl. I amsuggesting, in other words, that the letters on the backof this relief might have constituted some sort of codefor the reference of the artisans in arranging thereliefs. For example, the eight Arapacana letters inthe right hand (i.e., first) column might have consti-tuted points of reference, while the letters to the left ofthem referred to specific reliefs or scenes, indicating



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262 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)their intended order of placement on the monument.We might speculate, then, that the unexplained letterswere abbreviations for the names or labels of narra-tive scenes. Thus im, which occurs twice (lines 3 and4) (and which, as noted above, could not be anArapacana letter) might stand for Indra (writtenimdra in Kharosthi), referring,for instance, to a scenesuch as Indra's visit to the mountain cave (the Indra-sailaguha), a favorite subject in Gandharan art andone which is attested at Takht-i-bdhT(Spooner 1910,23). The syllable ma might stand for Mara (Kharosthimara) in a scene such as the Buddha's temptation byMara and his daughters, also common in Gandharansculpture, including Takht-i-bdhi (Lyons and Ingholt1957, 65, no. 62). Likewise ba in line 1 might denote ascene of the visit to the ascetic Bavari, again found atTakht-i-bahT Hargreaves 1930, 43, Peshawar Museumno. 1151);and so on.According to this hypothesis, the numerical figuresat the upper left might be explained as referringto thetotal number of reliefs and some sub-divisions in theirarrangement. Similar graffiti-like inscriptions of iso-lated aksaras and numerical figures to indicate thearrangement of the pieces on which they are writtenare well-attested in Kharosthliand other inscriptions;see, for example, the Kharosthl numbers inscribed onbrick tiles to indicate their ordering at Harwan (Kak1933, 109), and the Brahmi letters apparently in-scribed in alphabetic sequence on pillars at Bodh-Gaya (Cunningham 1892, 8; Grierson 1896). Note alsothe comments of Taddei (1979, 397-98, n. 12): "Theposition of a slab in a frieze is often indicated inGandharan reliefs by kharosth! numerals or lettersincised either on the back or on the smooth surfacesof the front." And although it might seem strange forthe mystical Arapacana alphabet to be used for such amundane purpose, the Arapacana alphabet wouldhave been so familiar to the inhabitants of a Buddhistmonastic establishment that it could have come tofunction virtually as a standard alphabet in place ofthe elsewhere more usual Sanskrit varnamili.Of course, this last hypothesis is speculative, and Iwould decline, for the present at least, to commitmyself to any one of the possible explanations of thesignificance of the new inscription; the correct answermay well be something entirely different. One poten-tially fruitful avenue of further investigation would beto examine the back of other reliefs from Takht-i-bahl and other Gandharan monastery sites. It wouldnot be too surprising if some of these were to revealsimilar inscriptions12 which could help to clarify theenigma of the present one. For the meantime, there-fore, I would commit myself only to the position that

the agreement of the letters of the first column of theinscription with the first eight syllables of the Arapa-cana alphabet is almost certainly neither coincidentalnor insignificant; and that, while their purpose on therelief and their relationship to the other letters andnumbers remains uncertain, they do provide an im-portant clue for the long-standing problem of theorigin of the Arapacana alphabet.

III. TWO FURTHERINSTANCESOF ARAPACANA INKHAROSTHI INSCRIPTIONS

The incident in the early life of the future Buddhain which he visits a school and exhibits a knowledgeof 64 scripts (see above, part I) is a common subject inGandharan sculpture (see Foucher 1905, 322-26) aswell as in other phases of Buddhist art, for example,at Ajanta, Tun-huang, and Barabudur (see Krom1926, 44, and references given there). In two of theGandharan pieces, the slate or board on which theBuddha writes actually bears a legible inscription inKharosthi. The pieces in question are:(1) No. 206 in the Lahore Museum; findspot un-known. Konow 1929, 130-31 and pl. XXIV.2; Ma-jumdar 1924, 11, no. 28; Vogel 1903-4, 244 (no. 4),245-47, and pl. LXVI. 1; Boyer 1904, 685-86; Fou-cher 1905, 324-26 and fig. 167. See figs. 3 and 4.(2) No. 347 in the Peshawar Museum; findspot un-known, but probably "from the Khudu Khel coun-try." Konow 1929, 129-30 and pl. XXIV.3; Spooner1910, 9-10; Hargreaves 1930, 24-25; Majumdar 1924,19, no. 56; Lyons and Ingholt 1957, 55, no. 25, andfig. 25; Shakur 1946, 23-24, no. 23, and pl. VIII.2.See figs. 5 and 6.

The Lahore sculpture shows the future Buddha"3seated and holding on his lap a writing board. Theboard is upside down with respect to the sitting figure,so that the letters inscribed on it appear right-side upto the viewer (Foucher 1905, 324). The inscription12 One other inscription on the back of a sculpture fromTakht-i-bahi has been noted (Konow 1929, 63), but this

seems to be an ordinary donative record and hence notrevealing in the present context. (Cf. also the comments ofTaddei 1979, quoted above.)" Konow (1929, 130) identifies the figure holding the tabletas Visvamitra, the writing teacher in the Lalitavistara storyof the LipiSdIdsamdarSana; ut as shown by Vogel (1903-4,246), it must be the Bodhisattva himself. Cf. the followingnote.



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SALOMON:New Evidence for a GdndhdrTOrigin of the Arapacana Syllabary 263

Fig. 3. Lahore Museum relief: The Buddha with thewriting board.piece was read by Boyer (1904, 685-86) as saparana[hi]ta, "Le bien de soi-meme et des autres" (= sva-paresdm hitam). (Boyer supplied the letter [hi], sup-posing it to be concealed by the Buddha's right hand,which covers the portion of the slate between theaksaras read as na and ta.) Boyer associated this withdtmaparahitam, which is given in the Lalitavistara asthe phrase illustrative of the letter a. Foucher (1905,325) further suggested reconstructing the beginning ofthe inscription, which is concealed by the Buddha'sleft hand, as ata, thus reading the whole as (ata)saparana (hi)tam. Konow, however (1929, 131), read[s]amk'arana [anica*]ta, i.e., samskdrdndmanityatd,"(the impermanence) of the Samskaras," correspond-ing to anityah sarvasamskdrasabdah given in theLalitavistara as the illustration for a (thus obviatingthe need to "admettre que le sculpteur reproduit uneforme populaire oui l'd du pkt. ata '6tait emis' lepremier, tandis que l'ecrivain, en sanskritisant lalegende, n'a pu 'enoncer' qu'en second lieu, dansl'ordre alphabetique, l'd du skt. atman"; Foucher1905, 325). According to Konow (1929, 131), "Thefirst akshara cannot be sa, but is a mutilated sam....In the second ... we have the same modified form ofka which occurs in the words samk'ara and dukha-k'andha of the Kurram casket inscription." He alsoestimates the number of syllables covered by theBuddha's right hand as two or three, rather than one,as supposed by Boyer.Thus there are considerable differences of opinionabout the reading of this inscription (which is farfrom clear on the stone). But in light of the new

Fig. 4. Detail of the Lahore Museum sculpture: Castof the inscriptionon the writing board.material presented above, we should now consider thepossibility that the text may be part of the Arapacanasyllabary; for we have already seen one example ofArapacana in a Gandharl inscription, and fromBrough (1977) we know that it was followed in anearly Gandh-arTersion of the Lalitavistara. The firstvisible aksara, read as sa by Boyer et al. and as "amutilated sam" by Konow, is problematic; but itcould be seen as ram, or rather as ra with a pleonasticanusvdra-like flourish at the bottom, as is seen inother Kharosthl letters (cf. below, part IV). The nextcharacter may well be pa, as read by Boyer et al., ifthe faint extension at the upper left which led Konowto read ka is an extraneous mark. The third letter,read by all as ra, is in fact ca; the diagonal line at theupper left which distinguishes it from ra is faint, butclearly visible. The next letter is definitely na as readby Konow (Boyer reads na). The final letter, after thespace covered by the Buddha's right hand, whichaccording to Konow "seems to be ta," is very faint,but could be ba. I therefore propose the followingreading:

(ra[m?]) pa ca na . .. (ba)and reconstruct:

[*a] rapa ca na [*la da] ba.In other words, I suggest that the Lahore writing-board inscription comprises the first eight letters ofthe Arapacana, exactly as in the first column of theTakht-i-bahl inscription described above. Certainproblems, it must be conceded, remain. The readingof ra is highly uncertain, and ba is also unsure.Moreover, na instead of na is incorrect for theArapacana, where na is separatelyincluded as syllableno. 36. This, however, may be explained as symptom-atic of the well-attested confusion in Kharosthl in-

scriptions generally of the retroflex and dental nasals,which were not clearly distinguished in the GandharTdialect.



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264 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)

: t

Fig. 5. Peshawar Museum sculpture: Visvamitra withthe writing board, Bodhisattva on the right.These doubts, moreover, may be dispelled by acomparison with the second example, i.e., the inscrip-tion on the Peshawar Museum lipis'ldsamdarsanasculpture (figs. 5 and 6). This piece shows the teacher

Visvdmitra14 seated on a chair with the writing boardheld upside down under his right arm. The ratherbadly worn inscription, written across the top of theboard, was read by Majumdar (1924, 19, n. 3) asparana [hi]da. Konow (1929, 130), however, readsamts'areIidevama, "inthe world (whichever)writings(of) gods and men (there are)," with the comment(129) "I am not able to read the record with cer-tainty."'5 He associates this interpretation with thepassage in the Rilpasamdarsana ection (which followsthe lipisldsaamdarsana) of the Lalitavistara readingmdnusyaloke 'tha ca devaloke ... ydvanti kecil lipisarvaloke / tatraisa pdramgatu 'uddhasattvah, takingsamts'areas = samsare and Ii as an abbreviation forlipi.

Fig. 6. Detail of the Peshawar Museum sculpture:The inscriptionon the writingboard.Here again there are serious discrepancies in thedifferentreadings,as well as problems'withthe textualidentification;but it is interestingto note that MaJum-dar saw in the Peshawar inscription essentially thesame text as at Lahore. Now the first letter, read byhim aspa and by Konow as sam, is very much defaced,but we can accept pa as at least a plausible possibility.The second letter is ra accordingto Majumdarand ts'aaccording to Konow; but, as in the Lahore inscription,it can just as well be read as a somewhat cursivelywritten ca. For the third character I again preferMajumdar'sna to Konow's re;theredoes appearin theestampage a vertical mark above which could be takenas a vowel diacritic, but it is not actually attached tothe aksara and hence may be only a stray mark on thestone. Konow (p. 130) says that the next character,

which Majumdar read as [hi], "looks like la, with asloping line across the head. Though the line slopes thewrong way, I think it possible to read ii."He then readsthe fifth letter (Majumdar's da) as de, "with the e-stroke protruding from the upper curve of the letterand running into the i of iU."Considering the peculi-arity of the supposed diacritic running into bothconsonants, I am again inclined to disregard it as anextraneous mark, and read la and da. As for the finaltwo syllables (not read by Majumdar), Konow callsthe first of them "a fairly clear va"; but in his plate itis hardly visible. It is somewhat clearer in the photo-graph in Ingholt and Lyons (1957, fig. 25), and couldwell be read as ba, although the head portion seems tobe partially defaced. In the final letter Konow sees"6apparently broad ma." But here again the letter ishardly visible in the plate; in the photograph it isslightly clearer, though hardly recognizable as a fullKharosthi character. It may be pointed out, however,that there is a paleographic similarity between Ko-now's ma and the Arapacana letter which wouldappear in this position, dIa, whose upper portion,excluding the vertical, closely resembles ma. At this

14 Not the Bodhisattva, as stated by Konow (1929, 129); cf.the preceding note. Konow seems to have switched thePeshawar and Lahore pieces in his descriptions.

15 Earlier Konow (1926, 36) had read the inscription as adate, sam[vats'a]rae 20; but he evidently discarded this read-ing, as he does not referto it in Konow 1929.



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SALOMON: New Evidencefor a GandhdrTOrigin of the Arapacana Syllabary 265

Fig. 7. Fragment of the Arapacana syllabary in KharosthTon a wooden tablet from Niya. (Photograph courtesyof the Department of OrientalManuscriptsand Printed Books, the British Library.)

point the inscription runs into the right hand of theteacher Vi'vdmitra, and the missing vertical may havebeen concealed by it. da is therefore a possible, if farfrom certain, reading for the last aksara.In conclusion, then, I would propose the followingreading for the Peshawar Museum inscription:

... (pa) ca na 1(a) d(a) (ba) (da).That is to say, the extant text seems to containsyllables 3 through 9 of the Arapacana alphabet. Ifthis is correct, there should have been. two moreletters at the beginning (i.e., on the right), namely aand ra; in the photograph the (proper) upper rightcorner of the writing tablet (at the lower left in therelief as a whole) seems to be broken off or wornaway, and the missing space is more or less that oftwo syllables. I would therefore reconstruct the Pesh-awar inscription as:

[*a ra] pa ca na la da ba Cda.Although the readings of both inscriptions are byno means totally clear, I consider it virtually certain

that they are in fact partial Arapacana syllabaries.The similarity between them, though denied byKonow, was apparent to Majumdar, and can hardlybe coincidental. Konow's textual identifications areforced at best, and (as he himself admitted in the caseof the Peshawar inscription) not entirely appropriateto the context. The Arapacana, moreover, is exactlywhat we should expect, given what we now knowabout the history of the alphabet. For, not only do wehave another inscriptional occurrence from the samegeneral time and region, but, more importantly,Brough's discovery in the early Chinese Lalitavistaraof an underlying Kharosthl/ Gndhdri source whereinthe lipis'ldsaMdarsana follows the Arapacana, rather

than the standard alphabetic order, shows that thisform of the story was current in Gandhdra of theearly Christian era (and was, very likely, the originalform of the story). This being the case, and given theincreasingly evident popularity of Arapacana in earlytimes, it would be only natural that artists wouldwrite out the first eight or ten letters (or as many aswould fit on the writing tablet in the relief) of theArapacana to illustratethis well known incident.In conclusion, the Peshawar and Lahore inscrip-tions corroborate the other textual and epigraphicindications that the Arapacana syllabary was currentand popular in Kusana-periodGandhdra, and was thealphabet which was followed in the original form ofthe lipisdldsamdarsana legend. This evidence furthersuggests, without proving in and of itself, that thesyllabary itself may have originated in this sphere; apossibility which, as will be shown below in part V,can be further corroborated on internal grounds.

IV. THE KHAROSTHI ARAPACANA FROM CENTRAL ASIA

As first pointed out by Thomas (1950, 194), theKharosthl document (fig. 7), written on a woodentablet discovered by Sir Aurel Stein at the Niya Riversite in Chinese Turkestan (now the Xinjiang-UighurAutonomous Region of the People's Republic ofChina) and published by Boyer, Rapson, and Senart(1927, 187 [no. 512]), is a fragment of an Arapacanasyllabary. The object in question was described byStein (1921, 1.257)as:N. xxiv.vi.2. Oblong tablet. Obv. along upper edgerow of Khar[osthl]. characters with the long strokescarried down from each and curved over to formlotus-petal border along lower edge. Rev. split off.Good condition; ends broken. 6Y2"x 1/8" x Y16".



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266 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)Boyer et al. give the following reading for the surviv-ing aksaras (alternativereadings in parentheses16):

... ram(da) tham dam(ja) dham gam khamcham stam nam nom(da) bham chamnkam(tsa) pham tsam(ka)...Although the agreement is by no means perfect,these letters correspond on the whole with nos. 18-33of the classical Arapacana alphabet:18. GA 24. KHA 29. BHA19. THA 25. KSA 30. CHA20.JA 26.STA 31.SMA21. SVA (SVA) 27. JNA 32. HVA22. DHA 28. RTHA (HA, 33. TSA (STA)23. SA PHA, ITA) ...

Thomas was able to reconcile a few of the discrepan-cies even though he did not have access to the originaldocument. Thus for the first letter read by Boyeret al. as ram or da, Thomas (p. 203) suggests that "acorrection ... to GA . . . seems justifiable."My exam-ination of the original document18 confirmed thissuggestion; the upper portion of the syllable in ques-tion is worn off, but the traces remaining, includingcurved lines on both sides of the vertical, make it clearthat the original readingcould not have been ra or da,but rather must have been ga (see fig. 7). Most of thediscrepancies between the standard Arapacana and

the document in question as read by Boyer et al.,however, could not be satisfactorily reconciled byThomas; but several of them can now be clarified withreferenceto the original document, as follows:1) Before the first letter read by Boyer et al. andThomas there remain traces of two prior aksaras. Thesecond of these can be recognized with reasonablecertainty as MA, the seventeenth syllable of theArapacana. The one preceding it should be SA, andwhile the remaining traces are too meager to read it assuch (only the lower portion of the non-distinctivevertical line is clear), there is nothing that wouldcontradict this; we can therefore hypothetically recon-struct it as SA.2) The first complete letter is definitely GA, asalready noted.3) The third complete letter was read by Boyeret al. as DAM or JA. Although JA would be expectedin this position in the Arapacana, the letter is not thenormal form of ja, as its left hand member is bent intoa hook shape rather than a straight diagonal line as inthe usual Kharosthija. This makes the reading DA,or perhaps rather JHA, more likely. It is possible,however, that the scribe (who was evidently not anexpert; see the further comments below) actuallyintended a JA, and I have tentatively read the syllableas such.4) The fourth complete letter was read by Boyer etal. as DHAM.19 Thomas suggested (p. 203) that "thetrue reading would be SVA,`' but the letter is actuallyquite clearly SPA,20 not SVA or SVA as found in theusual Arapacana. But the discrepancy can be ex-plained on dialectal grounds, as sp and sv (as also spand sv) can alternate in Gandhari, e.g., sparga andsvaga = Sanskrit svarga in the Dharmapada (Brough1962, 103);see also the remarks below on character 14.

16 With regard to the inscription as a whole, Boyer et al.remark (n. 1) "it may be doubted if the anusvara is intendedin these aksaras, except in the case of samand kham where itis certain."The reference here is to the curved portions of thebottom of each letter, constituting what Stein (quoted above)described as "a lotus-petal border."I am inclined to see theseas calligraphic flourishes rather than as anusvdra diacritics;see below, n. 23.

17 In 194, n. 1, Thomas says "The original tablet, sent toIndia along with the rest of the collection, is reported as atpresent untraceable there." But in the slip of "Berichtigun-gen" added to the volume in which the paper is published,we read that "[t]he original tablet, not sent to India alongwith the rest of the collection, is at present preserved in theBritish Museum. The readings are in general sufficientlyclear." Thus Thomas evidently was eventually able to see theoriginal, but not to utilize it for his paper. The photographprinted here in fig. 7 is to my knowledge the first publishedreproduction of the document.

18 Seen in August, 1987, at the Department of OrientalManuscripts and Printed Books of the British Library, whereit is catalogued under the number Or. 8211/ 1390.

'9 Thomas (p. 203) further comments, "It seems possiblethat in place of DHA . . . the editors intended DA." This isnot correct, although Thomas was on the right track insuspecting that the earlier reading was wrong. The editors nodoubt had in mind the variant form of dha given in their(Boyer et al. 1929) pl. XIV, no. 72 (actually of uncertainvalue; see Boyer et al. 1929, 305), which it does resemblesomewhat.

20 This is the usual form of Kharosth! spa (a) as found ininscriptions and other documents; for example, in theJamalgarh! pedestal inscription (Konow 1929, 114), spami-asa (misread by Konow as sdmiasa; cf. Salomon 1985-86,284-85) = svdminah, and in the Gandhari Dharmapada, v.344, 1. 356 (Brough 1962, 175 and pl. XVII); as opposed tothe central Asian form of the syllable (S) as illustrated inBoyer et al. 1929, pl. XIV, no. 243.



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SALOMON: New Evidencefor a GdndhdrTOrigin of the Arapacana Syllabary 2675) The eighth character, read by Boyer et al. asCHAM, is, as noted by Thomas (p. 203), the same asSanskrit KSA, the difference being essentially one oftransliteration only. It should be noted, however, thatthe aksara does not have the horizontal diacritic line

above which is usually found with it in central AsianKharosth1,but not in Indian Kharosthi.6) The eleventh letter, read as NOM or DA byBoyer et al., is the most problematic of all. Thecorresponding letter of the Arapacana is RTHA (withseveral variants;21 see above, part I, and Thomas1950, 201, no. 28). Thomas (p. 204) suggests "con-ceivably NO, if actual in the Kharosthi, was thesinless [sic] misreading of a Brahml RTHA his origi-nal having probably been in that script."22This expla-nation is, however, hardly acceptable on paleographicgrounds, as Brahmi rtha has no resemblance to no.The character in question on the original documentactually resembles a normal tha (compare the secondcomplete character) with the right hand horizontalmember tilted sharply upward. It is not at all clearwhat precisely this syllable is meant to represent, butas it is clearly not a normal form for either no or dawe should rather think in terms of some variant oftha, as would be expected in this position in theArapacana. But the aberrant form could hardly beexplained as indicating the prefixed r of RTHA, sincepre-consonantal r is normally expressed in KharosthTby a loop pointing to the right at the bottom of thecharacter, and there is no trace of such on the docu-ment. It is just barely conceivable that, due to thepeculiar calligraphic flourish at the bottom of eachsyllable in this document (probably not meant asanusvdra as thought by the first editors; see notes 16and 23) the prefixed r could not be attached in theusual way, and was indicated by the aberrant form ofthe consonant; but in fact I know of no parallel forsuch a form. I have therefore tentatively read thesyllable as THA, on the assumption that it is someunusual form of normal Kharosthi tha.

7) For the fourteenth syllable, read as NKAM orTSA by Boyer et al., Thomas (p. 204) suggests SMA(as appears in the normal Arapacana in this position)or TSMA. The actual letter, however, cannot beeither of these, and in fact resembles very closely,except for a more extended upward curve at the upperleft, the fourth character, which I read as SPA. Ithink that in fact it too has to be read as such, eventhough this would produce an unexpected and un-desired repetition of the syllable. Now Sanskrit smregularly corresponds to Gandhari sv, and the latter,as noted above, alternates in Gandhari with sp; more-over, as will be seen below (part VI), the Arapacanaattested in the Chinese Lalitavistara also reflects vari-ation and confusion among these syllables. The dupli-cation of the syllable SPA may thus be due to scribalerror resulting from dialectal ambiguities (as discussedfurtherbelow).8) After TSA, the last letter read by the earliereditors, the original document shows traces of twomore letters. According to the Arapacana syllabary,these should be GHA and THA, and the traces of thefirst syllable, with a curve at the right side, wouldindeed suggest GHA. Of the last letter, only a portionof the vertical remains, which has no distinctivefeatures but could be part of THA.I thus propose to read the document as follows(substituting standard modern transcriptionsfor thoseused by Boyer et al., e.g., ksa and vha instead of chiaand phia):23

... [sa] (ma) (ga) tha (ja) spa dha sakha ksa sta fia (tha) bha cha (spa) vhatsa (gha) [tha]...This corresponds, for the most part, with syllables 16through 35 of the standard Arapacana syllabary:

16. SA 23. SA 29. BHA17. MA 24. KHA 30. CHA18. GA 25. KSA 31. SMA19. THA 26. STA 32. HVA20. JA 27. JAA 33. TSA (STA)21. SVA (SVA) 28. RTHA 34. GHA22. DHA (HA, PHA, ITA) 35. THA

" The fact that this syllable is subject to more variationthan any other in the Arapacana is presumably related to thepaleographical problem discussed here, in that both seem toreflect uncertainty as to the correct syllable in this position.

22 In this connection note also Thomas' suggestion (1950,205, n. 1) that the syllables na sa la ra a written upside downin the margin of Kharosth1document 511 (Boyer et al. 1927,186 [s]), which contains verses in Buddhist Sanskrit and wasfound in the same room at the Niya site as the document inquestion here, "might conceivably be arala (for pa)canarendered in Brahmi left-to-right order from a Brahmioriginal."

23 Here square brackets are used to indicate a syllablereconstructed from slight remaining traces, while parenthesesindicate a probable, but less than definite reading. Asexplained above (n. 16), I am inclined to take the curves at thebottom of the aksaras as ornamental flourishes ratherthan asanusvdra marks; such cases of ambiguous, anusvdra-likemarks are not uncommon in other Kharosthi documents.



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268 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)Thus Thomas' identification of the document as afragment of a (presumably) originally complete Arapa-

cana alphabet in Kharosthi is confirmed by an exami-nation of the original which was not available to himat the time he wrote his article. This examination alsoclarifies some, though not all, of the discrepanciesbetween it and the standard syllabary as preserved invarious Buddhist Sanskrit texts. The document ap-pears not to have been written with particular skill,perhaps representing the work of a student or novice;if so, this would explain some of the remainingdiscrepancies and inconsistencies, such as the repeti-tion of the syllable spa. (These and the other remain-ing discrepancies, such as NA corresponding to J&Aof the texts, will be furtherdiscussed below.)

V. INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR A GANDHARI ORIGIN

Of the four early documentary instances of theArapacana syllabary now known, three-the Takht-i-bahiinscriptionandthe two writing-board nscriptions-come from the Gandhart-speakingnorthwesternregionof the Indian subcontinent, dating from about the firsttwo centuries A.D.; while the fourth, probably slightlylater in date, comes from the region of central Asia inwhich Gandhari, in a variant dialect affected by thelocal language, had become the official language andlingua franca. Thus there is strong a priori evidence infavor of the theory of a northwestern and Gandharl, asopposed to a central Asian, origin for the syllabary.Moreover, the syllabary has certain internal graphicand phonetic features which corroborate the epigraph-ical indications of a GandharT northwestern origin.First of all, as noted above in part I, the syllabary isincomplete in several respects when compared to theSanskrit varnamdld; and the letters that are missingmay be taken to suggest an underlying Gandharl /Kharosthli stratum. The absence of the vowels otherthan a is suggestive of a KharosthTconnection, sincein this script initial vowels are written as diacriticvariants of the a (reflecting the Semitic origin of thescript), rather than with distinct characters for thedifferent vowels as is generally done in Brahmi (cf.Thomas 1950, 196). This being the case, the initialvowel signs for i, u, o, etc. were probably not perceivedby writers of Gandharli n KharosthT cript as separategraphemes. The simple consonants which are absent-n, jh, 11,and h-also point toward, or at least do notcontradict, a Gandhari / Kharosthi background. h,first of all, is entirely absent in Kharosthi.24 ha too

has at best a marginal status as a separate morphemeand grapheme in Gandhari and Kharosthi (see Brough1962, 59); h does occur as an independent grapheme,but as will be shown below, thejfia of the Sanskritizedclassical Arapacana was probably substituted for anoriginal Gandhar-ih. The absence of h is difficult toexplain (though it does sometimes appear as a variantof no. 28; see above, part I), but is in any case notdecisive for the question of the linguistic origin of theArapacana, since h is common to all Old and MiddleIndo-Aryan languages and Indic scripts.The evidence of the missing consonants, however, ishardly decisive in and of itself, since most of the syl-lables concerned are rare in both Sanskrit and Prakritgenerally, so that their absencecould well be attributedto statistical coincidence.25 But the anomalous occur-rences of twelve compound consonants in the classicalArapacana as preserved in the Sanskrit language andin Brahmi-derived scripts provides stronger evidencefor a Gandhari / Kharosthi origin of the syllabary. Thetwelve conjuncts are: STA (14), SVA (21), KSA (25),STA (26), JAA (27), RTHA (28), SMA (31), HVA(32), TSA (33), SKA (38), YSA (39), and SCA (40). Ofthese twelve, all but one-JAA-exist in one form oranother in the KharosthTscript and the Gandharilanguage, either as explicit paleographically analyzableconjuncts, or in the form of distinct characters whosepaleographical components are not entirely clear butwhose phonetic value can be determined by the San-skrit or other cognates of the words in which theyoccur. Explicit conjunct charactersare found in Khar-osthTfor SVA, RTHA, SMA, and TSA;26 and it isimportant to keep in mind that these are not merelygraphic archaisms, but reflect the actual retention anddistinct pronunciation of these consonantal groupsmore or less as in Sanskrit. (Gandhart stands apartfrom other MIA dialects in that it generallytends to bemuch less prone to the assimilation or separation oforiginal consonant clusters.)Among the remaining eight conjuncts:

STA is represented occasionally (but only in thecentral Asian documents) by an explicit conjunct(Boyer et al. 1929, pl. XIV no. 233). More commonly,Sanskrit sta corresponds to the KharosthTcharacter(7) which is conventionally transliterated as tha, or

24 Earlier readings of conjunct consonants with n as initialmember are now known to have been incorrect; see Burrow1937, 18.

25 The exception here is jha, which is generally common inMIA but marginal in Gandhari. Its absence from the Arapa-cana thus is a significant point in favor of a Gandhariorigin.

26 This last conjunct has in the past often been read as tsa;but Brough (1962, 73-74) has authoritatively established itsprobable value as tsa on both linguistic and paleographicgrounds.



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SALOMON: New Evidence for a GdndhdrTOrigin of the Arapacana Syllabary 269to V, transliterated iha. The precise phonetic value ofboth of these characters is uncertain and probablyvariable; for a complete discussion of the complexproblems involved see Brough 1962, 75-77. But whatis important for our purposes is that the KharosthTscript and the Gandhari language which it recordedevidently did retain a distinct character and soundwhich corresponded to (though it may not have beenphonetically identical with) Sanskrit sta.27KSA is commonly represented in Kharosthi bythe character Y, which is evidently not a graphiccombination of the charactersfor k and S,28 but whichnonetheless regularly corresponds to Sanskrit ksa.(On the pronunciation of this letter see Bailey 1943-46, 774 and Brough 1962, 72).STA is written in KharosthTwith a conjunct (7j)which may or may not be a stylized combination of saand ta (Brough 1962, 75). But here too, even if thegraphic origins are not clear, the phonetic value isevident from the Sanskrit correspondences.HVA corresponds to a fairly common Kharosthicharacter 7C, usually transliterated as vha- n inscrip-tions and as pia in the central Asian documents, whichmay be a cursive graphic combination of va and ha.This character is used to represent a non-Sanskriticlabial fricative (/f/) which is peculiar, among Old andMiddle Indo-Aryan dialects, to GandharT, nd which isdistinct therein from the aspirate labial stop (pha).Sanskrit SKA sometimes corresponds in Khar-osthi to a variant or diacritic form of ka, translit-erated ka, with the vertical line extended upward (%)(Brough 1962, 75). Although here too the precisephonetic value of the character is not certain, it indi-cates that a distinct sound and grapheme correspond-ing to Sanskrit ska was preservedin Gandhari.The conjunct YSA, as has long been recognized(see above, part I), was used in certain forms ofBrahmi script to representthe voiced sibilant /z/, oc-curring in Iranian names and loan words in Sanskrit.In Gandhari, however, this or a similar sound was acommon phoneme native to the language itself, notjust used in loan words; in the Kharosthi script it wasmost commonly represented by ja with a diacritichorizontal line above (7) see Brough 1962, 59-60.29

The occurrence of YSA in the Brahmi-derived ver-sions of Arapacana is presumably an attempt atSanskritizing the native Gandhari syllable za, which(following Brough's theory of the mnemonic origin ofthe Arapacana) might have come from an originalGandharTword such asjana (i.e., zana) = Skt. dhydna.Most likely it was this diacritic ja which would haveappeared in position 39 of an (original) KharosthTArapacana, corresponding to the YSA of the San-skrit / Brahmi syllabary; but unfortunately none ofthe extant partial KharosthTArapacanas contain thisletter (cf. Thomas 1950, 205), so this cannot beconfirmed.SCA is typically represented in GandharT/Khar-osthTby the normal character for ca with the additionof a diacritic horizontal line above (i). The pronun-ciation of this character was presumably similar if notidentical to Sanskrit sca.

Thus of the twelve consonant conjuncts in theSanskritized Arapacana, eleven have direct counter-parts in the form of distinct graphic elements inKharosthT GandharT.Only JRA seems to lack sucha correspondent. The regular correspondent of San-skrit jha in Kharosthi / Gandharl is the palatal nasalni, as in other MIA languages. Even in the fewdocuments (such as Boyer et al. 1927, nos. 510, 511,523) which record Sanskrit texts in Kharosthi script,there is no Kharosthl character for jia. This may bemerely coincidental, since, as far as I have been ableto determine, no word with jia happens to occur inthese or other Kharosthi-Sanskrit documents, so thatwe can only speculate as to how the conjunct wouldhave been rendered in Kharosthi had it occurred inthe Sanskrit.This problem aside, it can hardly be coincidentalthat eleven of the twelve conjuncts in Arapacana havegraphic and phonetic counterparts in the Kharosthlscript and in the Gandhari language, whereas most orall of them would not have occurred in other MIAdialects. Especially when taken in combination withthe epigraphical evidence discussed above, this stronglyindicates that, if the linguistic and geographical ori-gins of the Arapacana are to be sought in MIA, theymust be found in Gandhari.Of course, we must still consider the possibility-which was taken for granted by Levi and Konow-ofa Sanskrit origin. Against this, first of all, is YSA,which would hardly be expected in a Sanskrit origi-nal. It is true, as we have seen, that such a characterwas used in certain cases in Sanskrit; but this only in

27 Note that Bailey (1949-51, 398, n. 1) proposed trans-literating the traditional Kharosthi tha ( ) as sta.

28 The paleographic origin of this and several other non-analyzable Kharosthi "conjuncts"remains unexplained.

29 Here too the actual paleographic situation is complex, asseveral characters, including jha and (in intervocalic posi-tion) sa, sa, and dha, were apparently also used to render / z/in KharosthL.But ja was the most distinctive character used

for this purpose, and is therefore the one most likely to haveunderlain the BrahmT sa.



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270 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)a very limited geographical and chronological sphere,and in epigraphical and numismatic contexts only,and even there only for writing Iranian or otherforeign names and loan words (mostly official titlesand the like). If, as seems most likely, the originalArapacana arose as some sort of mnemonic devicebased on a Buddhist canonical or didactic text, therecould hardly be any reason for such foreign words tooccur in it. Moreover, the general pattern of theremaining eleven conjuncts also does not point towardan original formulation of the Arapacana in Sanskrit.Several of them, particularly HVA, TSA, and SCA,are relatively uncommon in Sanskrit, whereas some ofthe most common consonant groups of Sanskrit (e.g.,pra, tra, sya, etc.) do not appear.All indications, then, point to a GandharT rigin forthe Arapacana syllabary; but some problems remain.There is, first of all, the matter of the syllable jia,which did not exist in that language. But from thecentral Asian document (above, part IV) it wouldseem that the early forms of Arapacana had ha in thisposition (no. 27). This, along with other discrepanciesbetween this document30and the classical form of theArapacana, suggests that an original Gandharl Ara-pacana was subjected to a process of Sanskritization,albeit perhaps gradual and unsystematic, and that theform in which the Arapacana has come down to us inBuddhist Sanskrit texts reflects both a linguistic adap-tation to Sanskrit and a graphic adaptation to BrahmT-derived scripts. Such a development would be fullyconsistent with the typical patterns of linguistic devel-opment of Buddhist literature in general. One caneasily imagine how a translator or editor who wasfamiliar with both GandharT nd Sanskrit would havereadily Sanskritized distinctive KharosthTcharacterssuch as vha, th'a, or ka into their Sanskrit counter-parts hva, sta, and ska. A few characters, though,notably ja (i.e. /za/) and na would have presentedproblems. The former would be most readily repro-duced in Sanskrit by its nearest phonetic equivalentja, but this had already been used in the alphabet (no.20). It therefore had to be rendered by ysa, which wascurrent as a graphic device in the Saka-Kusana erafor writing foreign names and words, as noted above.ha also presented a problem in that it could not standas an independent phoneme in Sanskrit. It thus

evidently was reinterpretedas jia, this being both thenearest common phonetic equivalent, and (as wouldhave been readily apparent to a scribe with someknowledge of Sanskrit) the commonest Sanskrit sourceof Gandharliha.Thus the classical Arapacana can be best accountedfor as a semi-Sanskritized version of an underlyingGandhari original. The notion of a process, perhapsmore or less haphazard, of Sanskritization is con-

sistent with the variation and evident uncertainty as tothe correct syllables in several places in the versions ofthe Arapacana preserved in Sanskrit texts. We haveseen above that the central Asian Arapacana docu-ment also displays similar uncertainties and incon-sistencies, such as the repetition of the syllable SPA,which seem to reflect confusions and contaminationsbetween Sanskrit and GandharT rthographies.Of course, if the classical Arapacana is the productof the Sanskritized MIA original, we must also con-sider the other Prakrits (or hybrid dialects) as possiblesources. In principle, at least, this is a possibility; insuch a case, the Sanskrit-appearing conjuncts wouldrepresent a reconstruction of the original Prakritsyllables (e.g., RTHA reconstructed from a PrakritT(T)HA), or perhaps rather of the key words withwhich they were associated (e.g., artha from attha).Nonetheless, the pattern of these conjuncts is inalmost every case much more readily associable withthe phonetic structure of GandharT. This, togetherwith the now strong documentary evidence, makes itunlikely that any other Prakrit dialect underlay theArapacana.

VI. CONCLUSION

We thus have strong indications on historical, epi-graphical, paleographic, and linguistic grounds3' thatthe Arapacana syllabary was originally formulated inthe Gandhari language and recorded in the KharosthTscript. But it must still be taken into account thatBrough-never a voice to be taken lightly-expresseddoubts about a GandharT rigin for the Arapacana, asalready cited in part I of this paper. Brough does agreethat the Chinese text in question was translated from aGandharl version of the Lalitavistara, on the groundsof such examples as no. 10, SA, for which the headword in the Chinese translation reflects an underlying

30 Very likely, similar patterns of divergence from theclassical form would have emerged, had the other inscrip-tional records of the Arapacana contained complete versionsof the syllabary. But since they contain (at most) only thefirst ten syllables, among which none of the conjuncts occur,they do not provide us with any furtherdata on this matter.

3'A further indication from the side of the history ofBuddhism is the occurrence (referred to above, part I) of theArapacana in the Vinaya of the Dharmaguptakas, a sectwhich seems to be associated with the Gandhari language;see von Hinuber 1985, 73-75.



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SALOMON: New Evidence for a GdndhdrTOrigin of the Arapacana Syllabary 271Gandhari sadha = Sanskrit sraddhd (Brough 1977,88-89). Nevertheless, he concludes (p. 94) that otherevidence "stronglysuggests that Gandhari was not thelanguage of the earliest form of the syllabary." Here heis referring particularly to the character d 'self',corresponding to no. 31, SMA, of the Arapacana. Nowthe normal phonetic development in Gandhari is forSanskrit sm to become sv; this is reflected in no. 21 ofthe Lalitavistara list, which indicates an original Gan-dhari svadi = Skt. smrti for the syllable SVA (Brough1977, 90). But in no. 31, a head word presumablyreflecting Sanskrit sva- is used to illustrate SMA; thisreverse development would be difficult to explain foran originally GandharTArapacana (p. 92), and Broughtakes this to indicate that the Arapacana was notoriginally formulated in that dialect.But such a reverse phonetic development could beexplained as the result of hyper-Sanskritization orsome similar misunderstanding, such as are commonlyattested in Gandhari and in other MIA languages.Furthermore, it is surely significant that the twosyllables in question, nos. 21 and 31 of the classicalArapacana, are precisely those for which the centralAsian Arapacana has the same syllable, SPA. Thisindicates that there has been some kind of textual /dialectal problem in the history of the syllabary atthese points. Though given the available materials itdoes not seem possible to sort out the details of theprocess and clearly reconstruct the originals, it issurely significant that the patterns of variation in-volving the syllables sma/sva/spa in the central AsianArapacana and in the Lalitavistara reflect phoneticdevelopments which are typical of Gdndhari, but notof other IA languages. Seen in this context, one caseof what would seem to be a phonetic developmentthat is the reverse of what would be expected inGandharT s hardly cause to rule out the language as asource: on the contrary, the situation as a wholespeaks in favor of GandharT.Thus a case can be made that the new documentsnow available, all pointing toward a Gdndharl origin,constitute the "unexpected additional evidence"Brough (p. 94) hoped for to solve the "mystery"of theoriginal of the Arapacana; and that their combinedforce outweighs Brough's doubts on the point, whichare after all based mainly on the single point notedabove. In conclusion, then, all the evidence nowavailable-three inscriptions from the Gandharl re-gion, a document from central Asia, the Chinesetranslation of a GandharTLalitavistara with wordsarranged in the Arapacana order, and the internalphonetic and paleographic characteristics of the clas-sical Arapacana as preserved in various Sanskrit

texts-points toward an original formulation in Gan-dharT,overlaid with a gradual Sanskritization. Despitecomplex and perhaps unsolvable problems aboutsome specific details and some minor inconsistenciesin the different attestations, it now seems nearlydefinite that the syllabary was originally formulated ina Gandhari-speaking environment and written in theKharosthl script.We are of course still left with the question of therationale behind the selection and ordering of thesyllables themselves, and on this point I have little toadd to Brough's ingenious theory, mentioned above,of a formulation from the head words of someimportant text. The information provided here wouldsuggest that such a text must have been in Gandhar1;but if so, there is little hope of identifying it, at leastin its original Gandharliform, since we have in thislanguage only the Dharmapada and a few inscrip-tional fragments of Buddhist texts. In view of thecontinued new discoveries and progress of research inGandharT n recent years, however, the situation is notquite hopeless.But one other possibility may be mentioned here; weshould keep in mind that we do not know for certainwhat the normal order of syllables was in the Gdn-dhari / Kharosthi alphabet. It is usually assumed thatit was either the same as the normal Brahmiordering (aa i i. ... ka kha ga gha, etc.), or as in its Semiticprototype (a ba ga da, etc.; Thomas [1950, 196]assumes that the order followed that of Aramaic). Butso far as I know there is no documentary evidence thatproves either of these. Thus it may be kept in mind as aremote possibility that the Arapacanasyllabaryderives,not from a textual mnemonic as proposed by Brough,but from some pre-existent Gandhdri arrangement ofsyllables. In this connection it is interesting to note thatthe terracotta plaque from Sugh (Chhabra 1974) andsimilar pieces (Shastri 1985, 75) show scenes similar tothose of the two writing board inscriptions discussedabove, with portions of the BrdhmTalphabet, in itsstandard order, on the writing board; in light of thisthe Gandharan sculptures might be taken as a similarrepresentation of the ordinary Kharosthi alphabet aswritten by a schoolboy. The hypothesis that theArapacana syllabary was a pre-existing standard or-dering-an "alphabet," so to speak-would have theadvantage of being in accord with the principlepointed out by Thomas (1950, 196) that "[i]n 'charade'literature universally the order of the letters is theprius, and the order of the signified notions is depen-dent." On the other hand, the presence of a limitedand seemingly arbitrary selection of consonantal con-juncts in the Arapacana would be hard to explain in



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272 Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.2 (1990)any derivation from a normal "alphabet";and for thisreason, more than any other, Brough's hypothesis of a mnemonic origin must remain for the time being thepreferablealternative.

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