Dear Indologists,
It's always a treat to see threads about Nepal on Indology :). Thanks Charles, Matthew, and Sam for your contributions.
Sam: It's fascinating to hear your explanation of Bhujimol in reference to the "squiggle" E on a consonant. I was told that "bhujimol/bhujimogal" refers to the circular Odia-like "hooked" head used on most Bhujimol consonants instead of the T-shaped flat head seen in Pracalit, Nagari, Bangla, Gurmukhi, Tibetan, etc. Likewise, some catalogues and secondary sources will refer to Bhujimol script as "Kuṭila" or "Kuṭila-Newa(ri)." I was not aware that there were different explanations for the meaning of "Bhujimol" -- super interesting!
Harry: In my experience, many Newa MSS are written without word spaces or breaks. However, I've worked with a not-so-insignificant number of Newa MSS (especially later ones) that do have dots or slight spaces between words. And just to second what has already been said, in my experience Nepālākṣara most commonly refers to Bhujimol or Pracalit -- though theoretically it could refer to any number of Nepalese scripts as Sam has adequately explained.
Sincerely,
Westin Harris
Ph.D. Candidate
Study of Religion
University of California, Davis
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies
Sarva Mangalam.
This is a fair point, and includes manuscripts used in worship (e.g, prajnaparamita mss written with gold letters). I should qualify my earlier statement to say that ranjana is an uncommon script, reserved for more specialized and elevated manuscripts, especially those regularly used in ritual worship (often of the manuscript itself).
Sam
Actually, besides palm leaf, some of the ones I’ve seen are very ornate, written in silver or gold on black-painted paper similar to Tibetan mthing shog.
Matthew
On Sun, Dec 8, 2024 at 00:12, Charles DiSimone <
disimone@alumni.stanford.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Matthew writes:
“Unless I am somehow missing his point, this seems to me not to be correct. I have seen complete manuscripts of the PañcarakSa and of the ASTasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā written in Rañjana, for example.”
I have also seen manuscripts of the very same works noted above in Rañjana. On palm leaf if I remember correctly.
All my best,
Charles
Sent from my iPhone
> On Dec 8, 2024, at 12:09 AM, Matthew Kapstein via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:
>
> Unless I am somehow missing his point, this seems to me not to be correct. I have seen complete manuscripts of the PañcarakSa and of the ASTasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā written in Rañjana, for example.
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