2. Conventional Approach and Understanding

It is widely believed and held that there was no writing system in Tibet before King Srongtsan Gampo in seventh century CE. The benevolent King Srongtsan Gampo, who having earned great respect from the neighboring countries for his great deeds and conquests, realized the need for a writing system; he sent Thonmi Sambhota, along with other sixteen people to India to study letters. While all the others failed, only Thonmi Sambhota survived to study and return to Tibet. He studied sound [sGra] from Lha rig pai seng ge and scripts [Yi ge] from Bram ze Li byin. Based on the fifty Indian letters of thirty six consonants and fourteen vowels, he composed twenty four Tibetan consonants and four vowels. To these twenty four consonants he added six words which were not found in the Indian origin, they were: ca, cha, ja, zha, za and 'ha. There are different versions how these six syllables were inspired, which we shall discuss this later on. Based on Indian Lan tsa script, Tibetan dBu chen was derived, and from Wa rtu script, Tibetan dBu med was derived. Tibetan cursive [khyug yig] writing came due to writing dBu med fast. This is the general understanding of the Tibetans on the origin of their language.

The Tibetan school text books by Department of Education under Central Tibetan Administration-in-exile in India has in a few lines reiterating the above understanding, that Thonmi studied scripts in India and on coming back to Tibet, he created [Tib:srol btod] Tibetan writing system. King Srongtsan Gampo studied the language for four years to achieve perfection^[1].