Lipi (script)
Lipi 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.
[2][3] The term lipi appears in multiple texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, some of which have been dated to the 1st millennium BCE in ancient India.
[7] 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.
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.
[33] 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.
[34] 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.
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.
[37] 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.
[45] 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.
[48] The tenth chapter of the Lalitavistara, named Lipisala samdarshana parivarta, lists the following 64 scripts as what Siddhartha (the Gautam Buddha) learned as a child from his schools.
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.
[10] 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.
[10] 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.
[49][50] 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.
[11] The Jaina canonical texts list the following writing scripts in ancient India:[54] 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.
