Threads of Interest is a simple, ongoing series where I follow ideas as they arise in real time. These posts aren’t formal essays—they’re starting points, half-formed reflections, and notes from the middle of learning. Each piece begins with something specific: a line from a book, a thought during practice, a question I can’t let go of. The writing helps me think things through. Topics often touch on Buddhism, education, language, and daily life. If you’re interested in the process of making sense of things, this series is a place to pause and think together.
1st Thread: Ajahn Sona and Persian and Greek Influence
Following the Historical Threads
Threads of Interest: How Buddhism moved through the ancient world
The inspiration for this thread came long before today. For the past year, I’ve been following Ajahn Sona’s unfolding study of Greek and Persian influences on early Buddhism. His careful exploration of cultural exchange, language, and historical context has opened up a deeper line of inquiry for me—one rooted not just in historical curiosity, but in understanding how the Buddha’s teachings moved through the world. How ideas met other ideas. How geography, empire, and translation intersected with the Dhamma.
It’s not that I was looking for something new—I’ve been studying early Buddhism for years—but I started to notice that my questions were changing. I wasn’t just reading about doctrine or suttas in isolation anymore. I was starting to wonder about movement—how teachings traveled, how they were carried, how they were received. And that led to thinking about the material conditions that shape transmission. Not just philosophy, but infrastructure. Not just ideas, but the systems that hold and move them. That’s how I ended up looking at writing. I wasn’t expecting it to become a focus, but something about it has kept pulling me in.
2nd Thread: Ashokan Pillars and Inscriptions
While tracing those threads—Greek philosophical thought, Persian administrative systems, trade routes and frontier zones—I arrived at the Ashokan edicts. These inscriptions didn’t just mark territory; they marked a shift. A moment where writing took on a new kind of public, durable role in India. That’s where today’s inquiry begins.
There’s something powerful about writing carved into stone. It suggests permanence, intention, a desire to be read across time. And yet, even with that durability, the meaning of those inscriptions still depends on context—on who reads them, on what they already know, on which languages survive. That’s part of what caught my attention. I started thinking not just about what gets written, but why, and for whom. The Ashokan Pillars became a kind of turning point in my own study—not because they were the first writing I encountered, but because they crystallized so many of the questions I’d already been circling around without quite realizing it.
I’ve also been fascinated by the Gandhāran manuscripts—especially the ones Richard Salomon has worked on. The fact that these scrolls are among the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, and yet still only partially understood, feels important. There’s something similar with the Indus Valley script: we have the fragments, the marks, the seals—but no full decipherment, no clear link to a known language family. These gaps speak as loudly as the texts we can read. They remind me that writing systems always exist partly in shadow.
Around that time, I started noticing that my curiosity was pulling in more than one direction. On one side, I was drawn to the technical aspects—how writing systems function, how scripts evolve, the mechanics of how spoken language becomes visual form. I found myself reading about linguistics, phonemes, and the difference between alphabets, abugidas, and logographs. On the other side, I was also being pulled into deeper philosophical questions. How does writing change what we know? What happens when oral knowledge—fluid, relational, rhythmic—gets pinned down and fixed in space? What gets gained? What gets lost?
These questions felt especially alive for me because of my background in early Buddhist studies. I started wondering how the development of writing in India shaped the preservation and transmission of the Buddha’s teachings. And I realized I don’t want to choose between these two paths. The structural, technical history and the philosophical, cultural implications both feel worth following. They aren’t separate lines so much as two aspects of the same unfolding.
3rd Thread: Global Emergence of Writing Systems
What else was happening around the world at this time?
This might not be the most obvious next step, but this is where my mind went after thinking about the Ashokan pillars. I found myself wondering—what else was happening around the world at this time? What were other civilizations writing, building, thinking about? I wasn’t interested in constructing a neat timeline. I just felt a pull to look around.
Looking around, not lining things up
What struck me first was how many of the major writing systems were developing or maturing within a few centuries of each other. Not simultaneously, but close enough to feel like there was some strange atmospheric shift—something about the human mind tuning into new tools. I was drawn to this wide-angle view, less for precision than for orientation. I didn’t want to compare these cultures so much as to get a sense of what kinds of symbolic activity were emerging in different parts of the world.
Four or five scripts—emergence or consolidation
Egypt had already developed its complex hieroglyphic system long before the Buddha’s time, and Mesopotamia’s cuneiform script was even older. The Chinese writing system was evolving steadily, rooted in a pictographic tradition that remained remarkably consistent. The Greeks were adapting the Phoenician script into what would become their alphabet, and the Brahmi script—possibly an adaptation from Aramaic—was beginning to appear in inscriptions like the Ashokan edicts. I wasn’t trying to lock down dates. I was trying to feel the texture of what it meant for humans to be shaping sound into symbol, and symbol into permanence.
Different systems—different logics
Each of these scripts embodied a different logic. Some were logographic, like Chinese, where a single character represents a word or morpheme. Others were syllabaries, like early Japanese kana, where each symbol stands for a syllable. Then there were abjads, like early Phoenician and Aramaic, which represented consonants but not vowels. And of course, alphabets, which tried to break language down into phonetic atoms. These distinctions weren’t just technical—they shaped how language was perceived, remembered, and transmitted.
What it takes to write and read
I couldn’t help but wonder what it did to the brain to learn to read in each of these systems. How did it shape memory, perception, even thought itself? Memorizing thousands of Chinese characters must develop a different kind of cognitive map than sounding out an alphabet. And then there’s Brahmi—something about it feels transitional, like it carries traces of a larger evolution. Again, I wasn’t trying to draw conclusions. I just wanted to hold the diversity in view, like a set of artifacts laid out on a cloth. Not to reduce them, but to see them as responses to the same human need: to make meaning last.
Clay, bark, stone
And then that brought me to materials. It wasn’t just what people wrote—it was where. On what surface. With what tool. The Sumerians had clay, and that made cuneiform what it was. Egyptians had papyrus. The Chinese used bamboo, then silk, then paper. Indians used birch bark and palm leaves. Greeks and Romans used wax tablets and parchment. The materials shaped the form. Palm leaf manuscripts are long and horizontal, made to be strung together—so their scripts run in lines that match that shape. Stone inscriptions are wide and visible, so they tend to use bold, straight lines. Clay invites pressure; paper allows flow.
That’s where I paused. I didn’t have a single argument or thesis. But I felt the shape of something forming—the sense that materiality was not incidental. It wasn’t just that humans created writing systems. The land, the trees, the reeds, and the tools were co-authors in this process. What was preserved wasn’t just thought—it was thought as shaped by matter.
4th Thread: Typologies of Writing Systems (logographic, syllabary, abjad, abugida, alphabet)
Side journey into linguistics
I’ve always been interested in linguistics, but I don’t know very much—so we took a side journey here, away from history and into the more technical side of writing systems. I’d always thought of writing as either an alphabet or as pictures that stood for words. That binary didn’t hold up for long.
Writing Systems
Once I started looking into it, there were more types than I expected—logographic, syllabary, abjad, abugida, alphabet—each one representing language in a different way. Some scripts mark every sound, others only consonants. Some cluster syllables. Some embed vowels inside consonants. Some began as one kind and drifted into others.
When I read that Brāhmī was an abugida, I had to pause. I’d barely heard the word before. An abugida is a script where each consonant has an inherent vowel sound, modified with extra marks. It was more compact than an alphabet but more complex than a syllabary. That changed how I saw Indian scripts—not as simplified versions of alphabets but as their own dense, efficient logic.
Cuneiform Script
Then I circled back to Cuneiform Script. I’d thought it was purely logographic—each symbol representing a word or idea. But no, there were phonetic components, too. Some signs stood for syllables. So even the “oldest” systems were more flexible than I’d realized. The categories blurred.
Indus Valley script
That led me to the Indus Valley script. We don’t even know how to classify it. It might be logographic. It might be something else entirely. And maybe the fact that we can’t decipher it says more about how we frame writing than about what that script actually was.
What I Learned About Typologies of Writing Systems
Logographic
In a logographic system, each symbol stands for a whole word or morpheme—a unit of meaning—not an individual sound. When I looked into this, I found that Sumerian cuneiform and ancient Chinese were the most prominent examples. While cuneiform eventually disappeared, Chinese characters evolved and endured, shaping not only modern Chinese (Hanzi) but also contributing to Japanese Kanji.
Even these systems weren’t purely symbolic. They often included phonetic markers to handle grammar or new vocabulary. That made me realize: writing isn’t just about what’s visible—it’s about how languages adapt structure into form.
Syllabary
Syllabaries work differently. Each symbol represents a syllable—usually a consonant-vowel combination. I came across examples like the ancient Linear B script used in Mycenaean Greece and the modern Japanese kana systems (hiragana and katakana).
These systems have fewer characters than logographic ones but more than alphabets, since each syllable has its own sign. I found it interesting that syllabaries often emerge in cultures with relatively simple syllabic structures. It’s a practical fit: one symbol for one sound-unit.
Abjad
An abjad is a writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant. The reader supplies the vowels mentally, based on context. When I looked this up, the most cited examples were ancient Semitic scripts like Phoenician and modern systems like Arabic and Hebrew.
It made sense that these developed in languages where consonants carry most of the semantic load. I didn’t realize how efficient it can be—especially for fluent readers—but also how much it depends on shared knowledge of the language.
Abugida
This is where things got technical. In an abugida, each consonant carries an inherent vowel, and vowel changes are indicated with diacritics or added marks. I researched this especially in relation to Brāhmī, since I’ve studied Sanskrit and Pāli. Brāhmī is considered the root of most South and Southeast Asian scripts—including Devanāgarī, Sinhala, and Khmer.
Unlike abjads, abugidas make vowels visible, but not as standalone characters (at least not always). That hybrid structure surprised me—it's elegant, but it takes getting used to. Especially when multiple vowel signs interact with one consonant.
Alphabet
This one’s most familiar. In an alphabetic system, each symbol corresponds to a single phoneme—either a consonant or a vowel. Greek was the first to clearly mark both consonants and vowels, and Latin developed from there. That’s how we ended up with the writing systems used for English and many other global languages today.
The balance of simplicity and flexibility in alphabets helps explain their spread. But even they come with quirks—silent letters, historical leftovers, and orthographic mismatches. It reminded me that “simple” systems still carry deep layers of evolution.
5th Thread: Cognition and Script Complexity
At one point in this flow, I paused and looked up whether the kind of script we grew up reading might subtly shape how we think—not dramatically, but through what the eyes and brain learn early on.
I discovered that reading logographic systems—like Chinese characters—engages different areas of the brain, particularly more right-hemisphere visual and visuospatial regions, compared to reading alphabetic systems like English, which rely more on phonological processing in the left hemisphere Wiley Online Library+15SpringerLink+15Scholars @ UT Health San Antonio+15.
One study I found compared brain activity in English versus Chinese readers, showing that regions like the left middle frontal gyrus and other orthography-to-phonology circuits activate differently depending on whether a script is phonetic or logographic SpringerLink+1Scholars @ UT Health San Antonio+1. It didn’t say one system is better—it just showed that they ask different things of our minds. These differences might influence how children develop literacy, how memory functions, or how people learn other languages later on.
I didn’t stay here long, but I tucked the question away. Not every wonder has to be answered right now.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_word_form_area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124388
6th Thread: Materiality of Writing
One of the first questions that came up for me early in this project was pretty basic, but it’s stayed with me: Why didn’t the early texts in India survive the way they did in Egypt? It wasn’t a planned line of inquiry—it just surfaced naturally in conversation, and I kept thinking about it. The dry deserts of North Africa preserved scrolls and carvings for centuries. But in India, so much of what was written disappeared. I started wondering: was that because of climate? Materials? Or something else entirely?
That question opened up a whole new thread for me—one I hadn’t followed before. I began looking into what people wrote on: clay, palm leaf, birch bark, stone, copper. Each of these materials carries its own life span, its own vulnerabilities. And I began to see how the physical substance of writing isn’t just a container—it shapes what gets said, how it’s said, and whether it makes it to us at all.
The Gandhāran scrolls have become something of a touchstone for this line of thought. They’re so fragile—cracked, fragmentary, easily lost—and yet they’ve survived. Maybe only because they were stored in dry earth. Maybe by chance. But their endurance reminds me that preservation often depends more on environment and accident than on intent.
That realization has shifted how I think about writing systems altogether. They’re not just neutral technologies. Clay leaves a different kind of trace than bark. Stone demands brevity. Palm leaf can be copied but not stored forever. These surfaces shape the pace, rhythm, and feel of what gets transmitted. And they shape memory, too—not just what’s remembered, but how. The deeper I go, the more I feel like I’m not just studying writing—I’m studying the world it had to live in.
7th Thread: Gandhāran Scrolls and Indus Script
Earlier in this exploration, I’d been listening to Ajahn Sona speak about the cultural crossroads of Gandhāra—a region stretched across what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. He mentioned the Buddhist scrolls found there while in conversation with Richard Salomon, who has spent decades studying these texts. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, but the way they spoke about Gandhāra—as a threshold between worlds, between climates, between scripts—stuck with me.
I followed the thread.
The Gandhāran scrolls are some of the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts. Written in Gāndhārī, using the Kharoṣṭhī script, and dating from the first centuries CE, they’ve survived mostly because of where they were buried—in dry earth, sealed in clay jars. What we have are fragments. The texts are partial, broken, incomplete. But they offer something that the polished recitations of later canons sometimes can’t: a glimpse of the lived texture of a transmission. Not the ideal, but the real.
It made me pause. If the Buddha lived in northeastern India, why is our oldest physical evidence of his teachings from a thousand miles away? And how much of what we call a canon is simply what lasted—what happened to survive in material form?
That brought me to the Indus Valley. Seals. Inscriptions. Symbols that might be writing—or might not. No one has cracked them yet. There’s no Rosetta Stone. No long texts. The script might be logographic, syllabic, symbolic, or something we don’t yet have a framework for. It might not even be a script in the way we define writing today. But it existed. It was carved. It was repeated. It left a trace.
And that trace sits at the edge of our categories. I’m starting to see that it’s not just that we’ve lost certain histories. It’s that we’ve built our understanding on what materials have made it through time. And that’s a fragile foundation. Some scripts, some languages, some cultures—if they lived in damp soil or used perishable media—simply didn’t stand a chance.
The gaps are part of the story. Maybe even the most honest part.
References:
- Ajahn Sona on Gandhāra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGpRT0w-_w4
- Gandhāran Buddhist texts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhāran_Buddhist_texts
- Richard Salomon’s research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Salomon
- Indus script overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
- Kharoṣṭhī script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharosthi
8th Thread: Orality and Early Buddhist Transmission
What began with the Ashokan Pillars—with carving ideas into stone and tracing the threads of writing systems—brought me back to something stranger: the absence of writing altogether.
Early Buddhism, as I’ve studied it, was an oral tradition for centuries. The Pāli Canon wasn’t written down until long after the Buddha’s death. And even then, it wasn’t a move toward permanence for its own sake—it was a safeguard against loss. The Dhamma had always lived in memory, in rhythm, in voice.
Ajahn Sona’s reflections on Gandhāra helped reframe this. He spoke of teachings preserved through embodiment, passed down by monks who lived and breathed them. Not because they were written, but because they were remembered.
And somehow, they lasted.
After everything I’d explored—logograms, abugidas, scrolls, materials that crack and fade—I was back at the beginning. Orality doesn’t survive in dirt. It doesn’t fossilize. But it moves through people. And maybe that’s why it endures.
Not in spite of its impermanence—but because of it.
References:
- Pāli Canon transmission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali_Canon
- Oral tradition in early Buddhism: https://suttacentral.net/introduction-to-pali-canon
- Ven. Anālayo, Transmission of the Buddha’s Word (PDF): https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/transmission.pdf
Endnotes & Bookmarks
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comparative linguistics
proto-indo-european
vernacular
prakrit
Indo-Iranian
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