nirvana

涅

槃

ㄋㄧㄝˋ ㄆㄢˊ niè pán

Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.

Script

Characters

Layout

The end of craving and of the cycle of rebirth. The Chinese word is borrowed from Sanskrit for its sound, so the characters mean nothing themselves.

Before you commit

Choose with care涅 and 槃 were picked for sound alone - 涅 is a black mineral used as dye, 槃 an old word for a basin. Split the pair and you have nonsense, so this one can never be trimmed to a single character.

JapaneseJapanese uses the same two characters, read nehan, with the same Buddhist meaning.

At small sizesTen strokes then around fifteen, the second dense underneath. Inked small, 槃 turns into a smudge long before 涅 does.

Meaning

Nirvana; the extinguishing of craving and release from rebirth.

A transliteration of the Sanskrit, universally recognised and used only here.

Other characters for “nirvana”

What to do next

Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.

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