Calligraphy in Tibet is not a decorative art added to writing; it is writing, done properly. Every script has its rules of proportion, every letter its order of strokes, and a child’s education began with a wooden board and a bamboo pen long before it reached paper.
The scripts
There are two families. Uchen, “with a head”, is the upright script with the heavy horizontal at the top of each letter, the script of woodblock books, inscriptions and this site. Ume, “headless”, is the family of hands written without the headline: the formal and ornamental drutsa, the long and short tshugs hands used for manuscripts and correspondence, and khyug, the running hand that a trained clerk could write at the speed of dictation. Beside them stand two ornamental Indian scripts, Lantsa and Wartu, used for mantras and titles.
The hand and the tools
The pen is bamboo, cut to a chisel edge, and the angle of the cut decides the thick and thin of every stroke. Ink was made from soot and glue. A student learned on a wooden board coated with a thin layer of chalk or ash, writing with a stylus and wiping the board clean, and moved to paper only once the proportions were in the hand. The proportions are exact: each letter is built inside a grid of units derived from the pen’s width, and a correct letter is one that fills its grid correctly.
What is here
The pages beneath present the scripts one by one, the history of the script, the tools and their preparation, and a course of practice from the first stroke to a running hand.