Korea Journal of Buddhist Studies ISSN:1598-0642(Print) 불교학연구

Sanskrit (梵字) is characters or language of Indian origin. Siddham (悉曇) is part of this, but, strictly speaking, it refers to the characters that had been used to describe the Buddhist sutra. The form of Siddhamātṛkā-character in Korea which was introduced through China is lacking in unity as long as we look through The Book of Mantras (眞言集) and the temple bells. The imperfect system of ‘the study of Siddham (悉曇學)’ is one of the biggest causes of confusion for scholars. Recently, books and treatises on the Siddham have been published, and are rated as they possibly will be the foundation of the Korean study of Siddham. However, they do not give us entire satisfaction in organization. This study was performed to present a different approach to the study of Siddhamātṛkā based on the preceding research. The earlier studies for Siddhamātṛkā, mantras (眞言) and dhāraṇī (陀羅尼) usually have taken the viewpoint of the Korean linguistic methods. Therefore, they were focused on the Korean transliteration, so, as a result, it has been asserted that various holywords are depicted as the Hangul, based on the phonemes of Chinese transliteration with reference to those of Sanskrit (or Siddham) characters. In this study, I progress the discussion through analyzing and comparing between the well-known mantra character-forms according to the sound of Chinese characters and Hangul. Especially, I treat the discrepancy(相違) of Siddhamātṛkā-character and correspondence of the character according to sound between Chinese characters and Hangul to the corresponding Sanskrit character through words such as ‘padma’, ‘svāhā’, the Sanskrit sounds ‘o, u’, ‘bhrūṁ’, ‘sarva’, etc. I expect that this work could systematize the changing progress and examples of Korean Siddham character-forms. Furthermore, it will serve as a trustworthy basic resource for Korean transliteration. Finally, I arranged some characters of Indian origin helpful for understanding Sanskrit.