Lipī

''Lipi'' ( sa, लिपि) means 'writing, letters, alphabet', and contextually refers to scripts, the art or manner of writing, or in modified form such as ''lipī'' () to painting, decorating or anointing a surface to express something.

The term ''lipi'' appears in multiple texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, some of which have been dated to the 1st millennium BCE. Section 3.2.21 of Pāṇini's ''Aṣṭādhyāyī'', composed before the mid 4th century BCE, for example, mentions ''lipi'' in the context of writing. However, Panini does not describe or name the Sanskrit script. The '' Arthashastra'', in section 1.2–5, asserts that ''lipi'' was a part of the education system in ancient India.

According to Buddhist texts such as '' Lalitavistara Sūtra'', young Siddhartha – the future Buddha – mastered philology and scripts at a school from Brahmin Lipikara and Deva Vidyasinha.Lopon Nado (1982), ''The Development of Language in Bhutan'', The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, page 95, Quote: "Under different teachers, such as the Brahmin Lipikara and Deva Vidyasinha, he mastered Indian philology and scripts. According to Lalitavistara, there were as many as sixty-four scripts in India." These texts list the ''lipi'' that the Buddha of ancient India knew as a child, and the list contains sixty-four scripts, though Salomon states that "the historical value of this list is however limited by several factors". A version of this list of sixty-four ancient Indian scripts is found in the Chinese translation of an Indian Buddhist text, and this translation has been dated to 308 CE.

The canonical texts of Jainism list eighteen ''lipi'', with many names of writing scripts that do not appear in the Buddhist list of sixty-four ''lipi''. The Jaina list of writing scripts in ancient India, states Buhler, is likely "far older" than the Buddhist list.

Terminology

''Lipi'' means 'script, writing, alphabet' both in Sanskrit and Pali. A ''lipika'' or ''lipikara'' means 'scribe' or 'one who writes', while ''lipijnana'' and ''lekhā'' means the 'science or art of writing'. Related terms such as ''lekhā'' (, related to ''rekhā'' 'line') and ''likh'' () are found in Vedic and post-Vedic Sanskrit texts of Hinduism, as well as in regional languages such as the Pali texts of Buddhism.

A term ''lip'' () appears in verse 4.4.23 of the ''Brihadaranyaka Upanishad'', verse 5.10.10 '' Chandogya Upanishad'', verse 2 in ''Isha Upanishad'' and verse 5.11 in ''Katha Upanishad''. It means 'smear, stain'. These are the early Upanishads and a part of Vedic literature of Hinduism.

According to section 4.119 of the ''Unadisutras'' as now received, ''lipi'' is derived from the Sanskrit root ''lip''. The ''Unadisutras'' themselves certainly existed before the time of Pāṇini, instances of later interpolations have been raised by Max Müller, although Müller does not discuss whether the sutra related to ''lipi'' was interpolated.;
Salomon in 1995 remarked "The external testimony from literary and other sources on the use of writing in pre-Ashokan India is vague and inconclusive. Alleged evidence of pre-Mauryan writing has in the past been found by various scholars in such sources as later Vedic literature, the Pali canon, the early Sanskrit grammatical treatises of Pāṇini's and his successors, and the works of European classical historians. But all of these references are subject in varying degrees to chronological or interpretive problems."

The Edicts of Ashoka (circa 250 BCE) use the word ''lipī''. According to some authors, the word ''lipi'', which is spelled ''dipi'' in the two Kharosthi versions of the rock edicts, comes from the Old Persian prototype ''dipi'' ( 𐎮𐎡𐎱𐎡), which also means 'inscription', which is used for example by Darius I in his Behistun inscription. E. Hultzsch, an epigraphist in the colonial British Empire, in his 1925 study on the Inscriptions of Asoka, considered the ''lip'' derivation untenable because of the two Kharosthi rock edict inscriptions from 3rd century BCE which use ''dipi'' instead of ''lipi''. Hultzsch, as well as Sharma, state that this suggests a borrowing and diffusion of ''lipi'' from an Old Persian prototype ''dipi''.

Chronology

Some Indian traditions credit Brahma with inventing ''lipi'', the scripts for writing.Jao Tsung-i (1964)
CHINESE SOURCES ON BRĀHMĪ AND KHAROṢṬHĪ
Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 45, No. 1/4 (1964), pages 39–47 Scholars such as Lallanji Gopal claim some ancient ''lipi'' such as the Brahmi script as used in the Indian texts, may have originated in Jainism.

;"Lipi" in the Edicts of Ashoka

According to Harry Falk, scripts and the idea of writing can be traced to the Indus Valley civilization in the 3rd millennium BCE, but the term ''lipi'' in 1st millennium BCE Indian literature may be a loan word from the Achaemenid region, as a variant of Sumerian ''dub'', turned to ''dipi'' or ''dipī''. Sanskrit ''lipi'', states Falk, likely arose from a combination of foreign influences and indigenous inventions. One evidence in favor of this view is that the form ''dipi'' was used in some of the Kharosthi-script edicts of Ashoka (3rd century BCE) in northwest India (in closest contact to Achaemenid culture) in parallel to ''lipi'' in other regions. As ''dipi'' was used in Old Persian Achaemenid inscriptions, Hultzsch suggested in 1925 that this proposal is "irresistible." In his theory about the origin of the Brahmi script, Falk states that the early mention by Paṇini could mean that he was aware of writing scripts in West Asia around 500 BCE, and the Paṇini's mention of ''lipikara'' may possibly refer to non-Indian writers such as Aramaic scribes.

;"Lipi" in Paṇini
Falk states that the single isolated mention of ''lipi'' by Paṇini, could mean that he was only aware of writing scripts from West Asia around 500 BCE. According to Paul Griffiths, there is "no hard evidence of the use of Brahmi or Kharosthi script" in India before the Ashoka stone inscription, but the climate of India is such as that writing on other materials would not have survived for over 2,500 years. So, states Griffith, "the absence of early witnesses certainly doesn't mean there were none", but there is no "clear textual evidence of the use of writing in the Vedic corpus".

;Opinions on origination
Kenneth Norman (a professor and the president of the Pali Text Society) suggests ''lipi'' in ancient India evolved over the long period of time like other cultures, that it is unlikely that a ''lipi'' was devised as a single complete writing system at one and the same time in the Maurya era. Norman suggests that it is even less likely that Brāhmī was invented during Ashoka's rule, starting from nothing, for the specific purpose of writing his inscriptions and understood all over South Asia. Reviewing the recent archaeological discoveries relating to writing scripts in South Asia particularly Buddhism, Norman writes, "Support for this idea of pre-Ashoka development f writing scriptshas been given very recently by the discovery of sherds at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, inscribed with small numbers of characters which seem to be Brahmi. These sherds have been dated, by both carbon 14 and thermo-luminescence dating, to pre-Ashokan times, perhaps as much as much as two centuries before Ashoka".

Jack Goody similarly suggests that ancient India likely had a "very old culture of writing" along with its oral tradition of composing and transmitting knowledge, because the Vedic literature is too vast, consistent and complex to have been entirely created, memorized, accurately preserved and spread without a written system. Walter Ong and John Hartley concur with Goody and share the same concerns about the theory that there may not have been any writing scripts during the Vedic age, given the quantity and quality of the Vedic literature.

Falk disagrees with Goody, and suggests that it is a Western presumption and inability to imagine remarkably early scientific achievements such as Panini's grammar (5th to 4th century BCE), and the creation, preservation and wide distribution of the large corpus of the Brahmanic Vedic literature and the Buddhist canonical literature, without any writing scripts. Johannes Bronkhorst (professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies) acknowledges that Falk is widely regarded as the definitive study on this subject, but disagrees and states, "Falk goes too far. It is fair to expect that we believe that Vedic memorisation — though without parallel in any other human society — has been able to preserve very long texts for many centuries without losing a syllable. (...) However, the oral composition of a work as complex as Pāṇini’s grammar is not only without parallel in other human cultures, it is without parallel in India itself. (...) It just will not do to state that our difficulty in conceiving any such thing is our problem".

Richard Salomon, in a 1995 review, states that the lack of securely datable specimens of writing from pre-3rd century BCE period, coupled with chronological and interpretive problems of more ancient Indian texts, has made dating ''lipi'' and who influenced whom a controversial problem.

Ancient Indian scripts

While historical evidence of scripts is found in the Indus Valley civilization relics, these remain undeciphered. There has been a lack of similar historical evidence from the 2nd and early 1st millennium BCE, until the time of Ashoka where the 3rd-century BCE pillar edicts evidence the Brahmi script. Late 20th-century archaeological studies combined with carbon dating techniques at Ujjain and other sites suggest that Brahmi script existed on the ancient Indian subcontinent as early as 450 BCE.

Sri Lankan texts and inscriptions suggest that written script were in extensive use in ancient India, and had arrived in Sri Lanka by about 3rd century BCE. While scholars agree that developed writing scripts existed and were in use by the second half of the 1st millennium BCE, the chronology and the origins of ''lipi'' in ancient India remain a controversial, difficult and unresolved scholarly topic.

Indian and Chinese Buddhist texts

The tenth chapter of the ''Lalitavistara'', named ''Lipisala samdarshana parivarta'', lists the following 64 scripts as what Siddhartha (the Gautam Buddha) learnt as a child from his gurus in Vedic schools, a list that is found in both Indian Buddhist texts and its ancient Chinese translations:, Quote: "(...) a passage of the ''Lalitavistara'' which describes the first visit of prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, to the writing school..." (page 6); "In the account of prince Siddhartha's first visit to the writing school, extracted by Professor Terrien de la Couperie from the Chinese translation of the Lalitavistara of 308 AD, there occurs besides the mention of the sixty-four alphabets, known also from the printed Sanskrit text, the utterance of the master Visvamitra,...."

;Historicity
The historical value of this list of ''lipis'' is however limited, states Salomon, by several factors. Although the Buddhist text with this list is ancient because it was translated into Chinese in 308 CE, the date of its actual composition is unknown. According to Salomon, the canonical texts of Buddhism may not be authentic and have interpolations. For example, he suggests that "Huna-lipi" or the script of the Huns listed as 23rd ''lipi'' in this list suggests that this part and the present form of the Buddhist text may have been fabricated in the 4th century CE. Other than Brahmi and Kharosthi ''lipi'' mentioned in this list which can be positively identified with historic inscriptions, other writing scripts consist presumably of regional derivatives of Brahmi which cannot be specifically identified. Some names such as ''Naga-lipi'' and ''Yaksa-lipi'' appear fanciful, states Salomon, which raises suspicions about historicity of this section of the Buddhist canonical text. However, adds Salomon, a simpler but shorter list of 18 ''lipis'' exist in the canonical texts of Jainism, an ancient Indian religion that competed with Buddhism and Hinduism. Buhler states that the Jaina ''lipi'' list is "in all probability considerably older" than the Buddhist list of 64 writing scripts in ancient India. The Jaina list does not have names that Salomon considers fanciful.

The authenticity of ''Lalitavistara Sutra'' where this list appears and other canonical texts of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist traditions, as well as "a complete denial of the existence of a historical Buddha", has been among the long debated questions in Buddhism scholarship. Suspicions about the historicity of ''Lalitavistara'', states EJ Thomas, are built upon presumptions which seek to reconstruct early history to fit certain theories and assumptions about what must have come first and what must have come later.EJ Thomas (1940), "The Lalitavistara and Sarvastivada", Indian Historical Quarterly, volume 16, number 2, pages 239–245

Tibetan texts

The Magadhalipi mentioned in the ''Lalitavistara'' is discussed in the 7th-century Tibetan texts, in two forms: ''dBu-can'' (script with ''matra'' or the framing horizontal line drawn above each letter of the alphabet), and ''dBu-med'' (script without ''matra''). The former is derived from the more ancient Lantsha script, while the latter derived from the Vartula script. According to Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, Vartula means "rounded shape" and likely refers to the rounded letters of alphabet that were invented for various ancient Indian scripts. Scherrer-Schaub adds that the list of sixty-four scripts in the Buddhist text likely contains scripts that are fictional, with Devalipi and Nagalipi as examples.

Jain texts

A smaller list of eighteen ancient Indian ''lipi '' is found in the Prakrit texts of Jainism (spelled as ''lipi'' sometimes), such as the ''Pannavana Sutra'' (2nd century BCE) and the ''Samavayanga Sutra'' (3rd century BCE). This list shares some names found in the Buddhist lists of ancient Indian scripts, but includes new names. The Jaina script list includes Brahmi at number 1, Kharosthi at number 4, but includes Javanaliya and others not found in the Buddhist lists. Scholars such as Buhler state that the Jaina list of ancient Indian scripts is likely older than the Buddhist list, but still belonging to the second half of the 1st millennium BCE wherein Javanaliya probably is the same as one of the many Sanskrit scripts called ''Yavanani'', which was derived from the Greek (''Yavana'') alphabet. The Jaina canonical texts list the following writing scripts in ancient India:

Devalipi and Devanagari

Given the similarity in the name, Devanagari may have roots in Devalipi, but Walter Maurer states that there is no verifiable evidence to prove that this is so. According to Richard Salomon, the Brahmi script evolved to become both the north Indian scripts such as Devanagari, Punjabi, Gujarati and Bengali, as well as the south Indian scripts such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

See also

Notes

References

External links

''Lipi'' in ancient India
{{in lang, zh, 佉留文字與四十二字門, 正觀雜誌 (1999)
The ''Lalitavistara''
(The play in full), translated by the Dharmachakra Translation Committee, pages 91–92
''Candravyakarana'' – Deciphering an arrowhead Indian script
Albrecht Hanisch (2009), Nagoya University
The Vartula or Vaivarta Lipi
Sita R Roy (1967)

Brahmic scripts
Hindu literature
Buddhist literature
Jain literature