Tibetan script

01Thonmi Sambhota’s letters

Tibetan tradition says that King Songtsen Gampo, in the 7th century, sent his minister Thonmi Sambhota to India to learn writing, and that Thonmi returned with an alphabet of thirty consonants shaped on an Indian script of the day, often said to be the one used in Kashmir. Whatever the exact model, the letters are plainly of the Gupta family, with the inherent a and stacked consonants of Indian writing.

02The great translation

From the 8th century, Indian panditas and Tibetan lotsawas worked side by side to put the Buddhist canon into Tibetan, fixing a Sanskrit-to-Tibetan vocabulary, the Mahavyutpatti, so that each term was rendered the same way every time. The result, the Kangyur and Tengyur, holds texts on grammar, medicine, logic and poetry as well as scripture. Rahul Sankrityayan’s four visits to Tibet in the 1930s brought back photographs and copies of Sanskrit manuscripts that had survived only there.

03Dunhuang and today

The oldest Tibetan writings that survive in number come from the sealed library cave at Dunhuang, opened in 1900; Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot took many of them to London and Paris, including the Old Tibetan Annals and Chronicle. The script is still used for Tibetan, for Ladakhi and Sikkimese in India, and for Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan. Prayer flags and carved mani stones across the Himalaya carry it.

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