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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
It has been known for many years that the Mahānubhāvas used ciphers for the transmission of much of their religious literature in Marathi. They devised a number of such ciphers which are known in the sect by names such as sakaḷa, sundarī, anka lipī, etc., but of all these sakala lipī is by far the commonest—no doubt because its extreme simplicity commended it to the scribes. Its invention is traditionally ascribed to Ravalovyāsa, the author of Sahyādrī-varnana, some time around A.D. 1335, but the earliest references to it are in fifteenth-century texts which simply call it ravalobāsāci nāgara līpa. One text of approximately the same date, however, refers to it as sakalita līpa and within the living tradition of the sect it is always known as sakala lipī or sakalī. The name has been variously derived from Old Marathi sakala ‘all’, because it was used throughout the sect, and from Skt. sankalita, because it is full of abbreviations. The former seems more plausible. The cipher was the first to be introduced and is the most widely used, whereas later, more complex ciphers tend to be the private preserve of one or other of the Mahānubhāva āmnāya or sub-sects.
1 For a brief account of the Mahānubhāva sect see my introduction to ‘A bibliographical index of Mahānubhāva works in Marathi’, BSOAS, xxm, 3, 1960, 464–507Google Scholar.
2 cf. Kolate, Viṣṇu Bhikājī (ed.), Eavalobāsa-krta Sahyādrī-varnana (Prācīna Marāthī Gadyapadya-mālā), Poona, Poona University, 1964, 9–10Google Scholar.
3 I owe to Professor J. C. Wright a suggestion that the name refers back rather to the Skt. source of OM sakala—sakalā, i.e. ‘done with art’, or even ‘possessing the aspects of divinity that are embodied in speech and writing’ (cf. André Padoux, , Recherches sur la symbolique et I'énergiede la parole dans certains textes tantriques (Publications de l'lnstitut de Civilisation Indienne, Série in-8°, 21), Paris, 1963, £77–81)Google Scholar. However, this last Tantrie concept has, as far as I know, no counterpart elsewhere in Mahānubhāva thought.
4 The Mahānubhāva histories (Anvayasthaḷa, Vṛddhācāra, etc.) are unanimous on this point, although it cannot be proved for the lack of a good manuscript tradition. No Mahānubhāva MS is demonstrably older than the seventeenth century.
5 Bhāve, Vināyaka Laksmana, Mahārāṣṭra-sārasvata, second ed., Poona, 1919, 494–5Google Scholar.
6 Kolate, , op. cit., 13–26Google Scholar; Muni Keśirāja-viracita Mūrtiprakāśa, Nagpur, Vidarbha Samśodhana Mandala, 1962, 14–17Google Scholar.
7 See table 1.
8 Although they may not always be clear to us now, the original reasons for these irregularities were, I think, purely practical. A probable motive for not using 
has already been suggested and I can well imagine that the character 
with no head-stroke and plus a kānā would have been hard to write unambiguously and so was discarded. 
and 
, which lie outside the system of varga blocks, have been worked in at convenient points.
9 e.g. 
ruṣi. See p. 331 and
in the list of abbreviations.
10 There are always exceptions, e.g. 
acyuta.
11 See Raeside, art. cit., items 98, 100.
12 I have not given all those from Kolate's lists which are not found in the Bhīsmācārya manuscripts. I suspect that many of those given in the preface to Mūrtiprakāśa are peculiar to that particular MS, and since I have no way of checking the exact form of these cinhem I have included only those which have an unambiguous construction and which represent new words rather than variant abbreviations for the same words.
18 See below.
14 The only verb regularly abbreviated is mhan-. All the common forms of this are given in the list of abbreviations.
15 Govinda-prabhu, the guru of Cakradhara.
16 i.e. Cakradhara, the founder of the sect. Some texts seem to prefer to realize this as Gosāvī, others as Sarvajna. In most cases it is impossible to tell which is meant.
17 Nāgadeva-bhaṭṭa, Cakradhara's successor.
18 Mhāimbhaṭa, an early disciple and compiler of Līlācaritra. As can be seen, the same cinha can sometimes have two meanings according to the whim of the copyist.
19 For a discussion of the realization of these mhan- forms see Kolate, Sahyādrī-varnana, 23–4. Undoubtedly they were originally derived from the old forms bhanije and bhanauni (cf. Master, A., A grammar of Old Marathi, Oxford, 1964, 165, 171)Google Scholar, but at the date of the earliest extant manuscript in sakala (c. 1600) they were equally certainly realized as mhanije and mhanauni.
20 Baiseṃ was Cakradhara's first female disciple. It was her questions that provoked many of the utterances which were later gathered into the Sūtmpātha.
21 Kolate, (Sahyādrī-varxiaTia, 21–2)Google Scholarexplains this cinha very plausibly as a cursive form of 
(the old form of 
plus u), so that strictly speaking it is only a variant of the preceding ‘sign’. However, in practice it is used so frequently that there is considerable confusion of usage between:
and 
, so that one occasionally finds forms such as 
parameśvarem.
22 One single example from a scribe who always uses 
: for sakala.
23 There is complete confusion between these tw o in the MSS of Gadyarāja-ṭipa. I imagine that originally there must have been some distinction.
24 The ordinary manner of writing kṛṣṇa in th e Mahānubhāva Devanāgarī manuscripts is 
.
25 This form is obscure, bu t stands uncompromisingly where th e other MS has:
.
