Katha (Pali spell-formulae)

What this is

A katha (gāthā, คาถา) is a spoken formula — a short Pali verse said aloud to make something happen. It is the atomic unit of the northern saiyasat: the words a monk or mo chants to protect, to bless, to bind, to heal, to summon. Unlike a genre, a katha is not a kind of book — it is a kind of utterance, and that is exactly why it turns up everywhere. The catalogue holds 184 witnesses whose titles name a katha — 179 of them on the palm-leaf and paper side, plus five contributed printed treatises — and they scatter across the whole collection rather than sitting in one shelf. Every count below is of those 179 unless it says otherwise.

Where a yantra is the spell drawn, this is the spell said. This page follows it from the story the tradition tells about its own origin, through what a katha costs to learn, into three first-person accounts of people finding out the hard way what it does — and out to the compression tricks that let a whole sutta fit inside four syllables.

The day the Buddha handed out a spell

Every efficacious tradition needs a warrant, and this one's is told in the books themselves, at length, as narrative.

The Akhom Magic of King Narai (pp.22–24) gives the fullest version. Five hundred monks, having studied Dhamma-Vinaya and meditation with the Buddha at Sāvatthī, set out for a village to devote themselves to ascetic practice. The villagers, delighted, fed them until they were content, arranged seats and sleeping places, and begged them to stay for the three-month rains-retreat; they recommended a forest nearby, thick and secluded and perfect for the work. The monks went.

What the villagers had not mentioned was whose forest it was. The amanut, the non-human spirits who held that ground, were annoyed by the tenants and set about removing them — appearing night and day as headless ghosts, as bodies with limbs missing, as every hideous and dreadful form they could manage, and wailing. The monks broke. They walked out of the forest, went back to the Buddha, and told him the whole thing.

His answer, as the treatise records it, is the founding sentence of this entire subject: "If that is so, learn a mantra from me, then go back and stay there again." He taught them the Karaṇīya Metta Sutta — Karaṇīyam atthakusalena yan taṃ santaṃ padaṃ abhisamecca — and they returned and recited it in the forest. By the power of the mantra the spirits who had hated them "came instead to feel affection and loving-kindness, and helped to guard and protect them from harm," and the place became quiet and pleasant and exactly right for practice.

The Supreme Maha Mantra Katha files the same episode as case one of three, with its source named — the Dhammapada commentary, volume 2 — and adds the other two: monks meditating in a snake-infested forest, several of them dead of bites, given the Khandha Paritta; and Sāriputta and Moggallāna gravely ill, given the seven Bojjhaṅga as ธัมมโอสถ, "Dhamma-medicine," until the illness lifted. The same page then makes the doctrinal move that lets all of this stand inside Buddhism: every teaching in the religion is at once ทีปา (armour against danger), นาถา (a refuge), ปติฏฐา (a shelter when one suffers) and เลณา (a retreat for finding peace). And it closes the argument with the line the yantra page also quotes: "พระพุทธเจ้ามิได้ทรงแจกยันต์ หากแต่ทรงแจกพุทธมนต์ มิใช่มนตร์มาร" — "the Buddha did not hand out yantra, but Buddha-mantra; and not demon-mantra."

Inference — read the story again and notice what it is doing. It does not say the spell was smuggled in from Brahmanism or folk practice. It says the Buddha issued it, on request, as a practical fix for a specific field problem — and the fix works by generating loving-kindness in the attacker, not by force. The archive's governing thesis is not something the archive imposes on this material. It is the material's own opening argument about itself.

The Narai treatise (p.28) gives the maintenance rule, in an old Pali cadence: "Mantras — if one does not diligently recite and regularly chant them, become tainted. A house, if not diligently swept and cleaned, becomes soiled. Laziness is the taint of one's complexion. Heedlessness is the taint of one who stands guard." A katha you have stopped saying is not neutral. It is dusty.

The recipe grammar

Corpus — this section and those below quote the contributed printed wichaa textbooks (digested into the `pages` table), a body distinct from the palm-leaf catalogue the counts further down measure. Densest is the Compendium of Ancient Katha ("ประมวลคาถาตำราโบราณ"), which is effectively a formulary.

A katha entry is a two-part unit: a Pali or pseudo-Pali formula, then a plain-Thai rubric of the form "คาถานี้ … ดีแล" — "this katha does X, and it is good." The verse is inert until the rubric names the act it powers. The book is not a scripture to read but a procedure list to perform.

And the operative verb is เสก (sek) — to enchant by uttering over. The word does its work through a material: "เสกปูน … ใส่โอ่งน้ำ" (enchant lime and put it in the water-jar), "เสกหมาก" (enchant betel), "เสกขี้ผึ้ง … เสกน้ำล้างหน้า" (enchant wax, enchant face-washing water). This is the same coupling of formula and object that binds katha to yantra and takrut throughout the collection — the yantra manuals simply run it the other way, spell into drawing rather than spell into substance.

One page of that Compendium (p.66) is the whole technology laid out as a list: three dozen formulas, each a line long, each with a one-line rubric. Read straight down, it is a portrait of what people wanted:

• Consecrate lime seven times, put it in the water jar — whoever drinks it "loves us to the breaking of the heart," "เขารักเราใจจะขาด".
• Consecrate water and drink it: invulnerability "lasting even against an axe's blow."
• Consecrate sesame oil eighteen times and rub it on the body to transform into a tiger.
• Consecrate rice and feed it to chickens — this is the Phaya Kai Thuean, the Wild Junglefowl King katha, which has its own life on the kai page.
• Consecrate earth and throw it down, warding off everything "as if erecting a seven-tiered wall."
• Recite while stroking a blade's edge, so it will not cut you; recite nine times to make a gun burst or misfire; recite to make a blow painless; recite to allow escape "even through the smallest gap."
• At night before sleeping, dip the hand in water, recite, and circle it around the head.

The invulnerability rubrics are the most totalising thing in the corpus. A titled "คาถาคงทน", katha of endurance, has the rubric "เสกสารพัดคงทนดีแล" — "enchants all-round endurance" (p.29), on the same page as a weapon-warding formula "ภาวนากันอาวุธทั้งปวงมิต้องเลย", "recite to ward every weapon; none can strike." And a longer one (p.22) covers every posture and state at once: "คงทั้งหน้าคงทั้งหลัง คงทั้งนั่งคงทั้งยืน คงทั้งหลับคงทั้งตื่น" — "durable front and back, sitting and standing, sleeping and waking." The Maha Yant Manual (p.30) has the identical structure, and adds the day and the night. The formula does not protect an action. It armours a whole life.

At the other end of the register sits the exorcism. One ongkan in the same Compendium (p.59) is a shouted eviction: the reciter drives out the ghosts of the forest, the spirits that ride mediums, the phi phut phrai, "the ghost of an infant who died in the womb," every ill omen, the water-prai and the land-prai — "leave the body at once and go and stay with the demons" — and the rubric is domestic and calm: this invocation makes lustral water to sprinkle away every kind of ghost-curse. Its companion, the Invocation for Sprinkling Water, is an undoing-spell of extraordinary reach: it undoes Chinese curses, Cham curses, Brahmin curses, Burmese and Mon and Lao curses, "a thousand kinds of foreign-script yantra," curses laid with no yantra or spell at all, sorcery worked in the shape of a pig, bear, dog, elephant, hawk, kinnara, dragon, stingray, sawfish or the face of Rahu, sorcery worked with cow-hide, buffalo-hide or monkey-skin. Inference — an undoing-spell is a map of the threat landscape, and this one names the neighbours: the north knew perfectly well that other people's writing systems were also loaded.

What a katha costs

Nothing here is free, and the price is specified.

Food. The life of Luang Por Thob (p.45) sets a table of forbidden foods keyed to your day of birth, for anyone studying formulas and sacred katha or carrying amulets: Sunday, no water spinach; Monday, no coriander; Tuesday, no pickled cleome; Wednesday, no boiled eggplant; Thursday, no pork; Friday, no phak bang; Saturday, no moringa leaves. The rule attached is unambiguous — if you do not abstain, "the charm will not take for you"; if you can abstain, "your amulets and charms will be far more powerful than other people's." Inference — a per-birthday dietary rule is what turns a one-off purchase into a standing practice. It also ties katha efficacy to the same birth-day machinery the almanac runs on.

Prohibitions, and what breaking one costs. The Teaching Meditation and Psychic Power volume (pp.23–24) is unusually explicit, and unusually gentle. Its crafts are "crafts of the Buddha's virtue," so mostly they carry no prohibitions, and breaking one "carries no penalty — it does not cause illness the way old-time black magic does." The remedy when you slip is procedural: light incense and candles, say what happened, ask permission to keep using the craft for now, and when there is time go and tell the teacher and hold the teacher-raising ceremony again. Then it lists the three rules of its invulnerability craft: you may not pass the formula on until you have held it a full five years (and then only after learning the method of being a teacher); you may not use paper bearing Thai or Khom script to wipe yourself when defecating; and you may not curse someone's mother during a fight. The technique itself is breath-work — hold, chant, and when the breath gives out, expel it in one sharp burst through the nose, draw it back, hold, chant fast again.

The same author is frank about the injuries (p.25). Test it on yourself three or four times, days apart, before you test it on anyone else. After a piercing test there will be a dimple on both sides of the flesh; do not pry it open to look, because the flesh inside will tear and blood will seep. Left alone it fills in by itself. Do not test with a razor or a ritual knife at beginner level, "because the invulnerability holds only for the outer skin — the flesh or bone is not tough enough," and you will get an internal bruise that turns into an abscess.

Time. The Mind Stream: Key to Saiyasat memoir (p.35) prices the good stuff exactly. Two uncles had received the katha for "the strength of seven woven-bamboo fighting elephants" from their teacher, Achan Sompharn Intra, and had served him for ten years before he handed it over. The narrator's own entry fee to the lesser teacher was five quids of betel and five baht; his father vetoed the date — "Today is Wednesday — better to study on Thursday" — and on Thursday he got "over ten incantations along with their methods of use." For the other uncle's knowledge he served four years.

A boy, a gun barrel, and a broken instruction

The best story about katha in this corpus is told by a man remembering himself as an eight-year-old, and it is about disobedience (Mind Stream: Key to Saiyasat pp.31–33).

Three of his father's disciples came from Ban On Nuea in Pak Phanang, each carrying an air rifle, to learn the maha-ut katha — the charm that stops a gun. In that district, the narrator explains almost in passing, tigers were fierce and bandits plentiful, so every house kept a gun and you carried one wherever you went. The three men had already taken the invulnerability branch from his father; this time they wanted the gun-stopper. They stayed the night.

His father taught them the katha, and taught them the prohibition that comes with it: once you have mastered maha-ut, never cover a gun barrel with your hand — not your own, not a friend's — because if you hold your breath and recite while covering the muzzle, that gun will not be able to fire out through the muzzle. It will burst instead.

The boy was asleep in the same room and heard all of it. In the small hours, while the three men were outside washing their faces, he saw a gun lying beside where one of them had slept. He recited the formula on a held breath — na ud, mo ud, namo phutthaya, dtantani — with his palm pressed over the muzzle, for several held breaths. The men came in, took their guns, and left.

Three months later Mr. Saeng came back to the house with a new gun and his twenty-year-old son to be enrolled as a disciple, and with a story. Five days after going home he had gone out for deer; his companion hit one and it ran; he chased it, fired, and the barrel burst apart in the middle. He had used that gun a long time and was very sorry to lose it. And he had worked out what must have happened: Mr. Nuan, who had studied beside him, must have tried the held-breath trick on his muzzle. The two men were no longer speaking. "Had it been someone else," Saeng said, "I would have had to shoot him dead."

The father sent for Nuan. Nuan came, ten-odd days later, and denied it flatly: "I did not do it at all, because Saeng and I love each other very much." At which point the father remembered his son, and called him over.

"Have you memorised the maha-ut mantra yet or not?" — "I remember it, sir." "Recite it." He recited it. "How is it done?" — "You hold your breath and chant, pressing the palm against the navel, every day before sleeping." "What is forbidden?" — "It is forbidden to press the hand against the muzzle of our own gun barrel or anyone else's." "Did you once hold your breath and press your hand against the muzzle of brother Saeng's gun barrel?"

He said he had, once. His father told him the gun had burst and the two men had turned on each other, and asked: "Do you know that doing such a thing is called breaking an instruction? From now on, never break an instruction again, under any circumstances."

Inference — the narrator's own moral is not the one a reader expects. He tells the story to prove that "even the most foolish person — one who could not yet write a single letter" — can work a katha, because he held no doubt whatsoever. The efficacy is never in question in this account. What is in question is whether a child can be trusted with it, and the answer, plainly, is no. In a tradition that transmits by teacher-lineage, the prohibition is the knowledge — the formula is the easy part, and a boy who overhears it has taken the dangerous half and left the safe half behind.

The mortar, and the four years in the shack

Two more scenes from the same memoir (pp.34–36), because they show what the tradition looks like at ground level rather than on the page.

An evening at the father's house, four or five men drinking. Once drunk they started boasting. Uncle Yi claimed the strength katha could be proved on the spot — recite it every morning on waking and you could handle a rice-pounding mortar — and pointed at one standing nearby, wooden, better than forty kilos. Uncle Hin said: no need to toss it anywhere. If it's that good, lift it and set it down on my head. Uncle Yi recited, stroking his own body hair for about five minutes, and his muscles swelled visibly. He nodded at Hin: sit down. Hin sat, recited, drew a yantra with his finger in a circle around his own neck, stroked his hair the same way until his muscles swelled too — and Yi lifted the mortar and dropped it straight onto his head. Hin leapt up, grabbed the mortar, tossed it in the air, caught it, lifted it up and down several times, and hurled it more than ten wa away "as if throwing a lump of earth the size of an arm." The boy watching was fourteen or fifteen. He notes, in the flattest possible sentence, that to look at the two of them you would guess neither could lift twenty kilos.

He went and asked to be their disciple. Uncle Yi, drunk, offered to hand it over on the spot. Uncle Hin said: you must stay close and serve me before I will give it.

That service took four years, and the account of it is unromantic. Every afternoon Hin was drunk. His wife had died; there were five children; the house was a small shack with the bedroom sharing space with the kitchen, "filthy in the extreme." Some days he wrapped his dead wife's black sarong around his head and went out, and came home at dusk stark naked. Every evening he stood and let the children throw clods of earth at him, however many, however often — and they never once hit him. If anyone walked past with a knife or a stick he would order them to hack at him, and taunt and curse them until they did, and nothing ever touched him. He never gave his knowledge to anyone, not even his own children. The boy finally got it out of him with a promise — Uncle, please give it to me; when you die, I will see to your funeral — and kept the promise.

Inference — the memoir's own summary is the part worth carrying: these were, in his words, teachers of "the most foolish sort," and their disciples likewise — "yet they possessed morality and were supremely grateful and loyal … For I have seen disciples who disrespected such debts of gratitude and did not honour their teachers never succeed at anything." The transmission rule in these books is not finally about secrecy. It is about whether you will still be there in four years.

The night of the victory candle

The same narrator, at fifteen, decided to test the sleep-spell (Mind Stream: Key to Saiyasat pp.44–45). His teacher had given him the war formula — สะกดทัพ, to stupefy an army: charm three limes and throw them over the enemy's heads, then light a torch or candle and walk forward reciting, and anyone who sees the light of the victory candle falls asleep without feeling their body, so that you can take the commanding general — but you are forbidden to kill him. The teacher said an entire town could be done the same way.

It was the rainy season and the water was up. He fetched a friend for company — the friend believed he could really do it, having seen him do other things — and picked a house in the same sub-district. At the gate he charmed three limes and threw them over the roof, lit the candle, and walked in through flood water up to mid-thigh.

The owner was sitting at the top of the steps holding a spear, looking straight at his face, and could not get a word out. The boy took the spear from the man's hand and planted it in the water. He stepped over the man's twenty-year-old son, who was sitting in the doorway. Inside, on the bed, someone was asleep — and at the head of the bed lay a gold necklace and a coin purse. He picked them up and gathered them in his hand. "My mind wanted them."

Then he remembered his teacher's order — not to act dishonestly, not to break the precepts — and put them back exactly where they had been. He walked out, stepping back over the dazed husband in the doorway, got down from the house, and blew out the candle. The instant the candle went out, everyone inside came unstuck and began shouting "Thief! Thief!" The two boys ran.

By morning the village had a story about a thief with extraordinary sleep-magic, whose victims had sat unable to speak "as if in a dream" — and, people said with admiration, who had taken nothing at all, not the purse, not the gold chain. The narrator's own reading is the one that matters: had he not followed the teacher's instruction strictly, he would certainly have taken the household's belongings — and he ends with the warning the whole corpus keeps returning to, that a person infatuated with saiyasat who lacks morality, or who learns it from a lineage that lacks morality, "becomes dangerous to himself and a menace to society."

Compression: how a whole sutta fits in four syllables

The most technically interesting thing katha does is shrink.

A หัวใจ (hua chai, "heart") mantra, the Yantra Inscription Formulas manual explains (p.15), is "a short verse condensed from a longer mantra" — extracted from the first word of each clause, or the last word of each clause, or a sequence of letters, or by other means known to one's teachers — for ease of memorising and reciting, "and also so it can be reduced still further for inscribing into various yantra diagrams." Then it prints the index (pp.15–24), and the index is a marvel: āpāmachupa, heart of the Vinaya; thusaphima, heart of the Four Noble Truths; titi-umi, heart of the First Sermon; ma-a-u, heart of the entire Tipiṭaka. Then it keeps going, off the canon and into the world — heart of Fire, of Wind, of Water, of Earth; heart of the Lion; heart of the Karavika bird; heart of the House-Turtle; heart of the White Elephant; heart of the Naga King; heart of the Horse King; heart of Paralysis; heart of the Land-Guardian Spirit; heart of the Crow-Charm; heart of the Termite; heart of the Thief.

Inference — this is the join between the two halves of the wichaa. A heart-mantra is small enough to fit in one cell of a grid, which is precisely why a yantra can carry scripture, and why a numeral in a yant cell can stand in for a formula. Katha compresses so that yantra can be written. The archive's glossary and its gallery of the 108 Na are both, in effect, indexes to this compression.

The showpiece of the technique is the Itipiso Paet Thit, the Eight-Directional Itipiso. Take the Pali verse of the Buddha's nine virtues; the letters "fall into exactly 7 columns of 8 letters each — fitting perfectly, neither short nor over — and so it is reckoned a formula of great wonder" (Akhom Magic of King Narai p.82). Once gridded, each of the eight rows becomes a direction and acquires a war-name and a use (Maha Yant Manual pp.26–28):

• Rain of a Thousand Arrows — chant and go forward; weapons may come down like rainfall and not one will strike. Face the direction as you chant.
• Narayana Swallows the Ocean — fill a tray with water, set a bronze alms-bowl upside-down in the middle of it, light one candle, and recite with the senses restrained until all the water has gone into the bowl.
• Narayana Overturns the Earth — rouse Mother Earth first, then proceed; charge seven pellets and eat them; it causes total paralysis in an enemy.
• Rounding Up the Himmapan Forest — chant, then round up your enemies, or any creature at all.
• Narayana Swallows the Discus — "one may wager to swallow a boat, or a latch; either can be done."
• Narayana Hurls the Discus (also Pinning Down the Three Worlds) — face north, close the eyes, chant 108 times. To go unseen for the space of one held breath: charge three betel quids seven times, eat one, pocket one, knot one into the hem of your cloth, then recite while holding your breath.
• Narayana Changes His Form — before doing anything, first change your own name, and only then act.

The Narai treatise names seven such recombinations in all — Rattanamala, Temthi, Paet Thit, Plaengrup, Kring Traiphop, Narai Khaichak, and the Heart of Itipiso — and calls the family the Itipiso Konlabot (p.81), a term that belongs as much to Thai poetics as to magic.

And then the family's most notorious member: อิติปิโสถอยหลัง, the Itipiso recited backwards, printed in full as Tiwakhapha thophutnangsanusamawathetha-sat… in the Warrior's Vedic Katha (pp.39–40). Its rubric is not what the name suggests: enemies "will merely think of doing you harm but not dare to; it instead becomes a source of affection." You recite it 108 times at midnight, facing east, without faltering. If you are imprisoned, chant it into betel-water fourteen times and "the wooden stocks and shackles will loosen and fall away at once"; if there is no betel-water, the masters say a light recitation will do. If someone has you in a garrote, turn your face to the head of the rope, count out 108, and blow toward it. The book's own gloss on its character is the best line in it: this spell is called "the hard one," and to soften it is like passing it near a flame. Reversal as a whole technique — in katha, in text, and in yantra grids — has its own page at paṭiloma.

The forward version, the Itipiso Noppakhun, is on the facing pages (pp.38–39) with two dozen uses attached, and the range is the point: recite it fourteen times in danger; chant it into water to wash misfortune out of the hair; three times to dislodge a fishbone from a throat; nine times to cut the venom of centipedes, biting spiders, cobras and the khaeng catfish; into bananas fed to a child to break a fever; into rice fed to a dog so it will not bark; into betel given to someone possessed, so that the ghost will speak its own name. The treatise adds a claim of its own about the formula's standing: that it was the one King Mongkut was pleased to recite constantly, as a daily devotion.

The shape of the collection

The single most important fact about katha in the palm-leaf catalogue is its genre spread. The 179 witnesses fall under buddhist_canonical (55), astrology (44), magic & ritual (28), jātaka (26) and other (18) — no genre owns it, because every genre uses it. The same formula-technology is the recited verse of scripture on one leaf and the efficacious spell of the wichaa on the next. Read this entity as the thread that stitches the chanting liturgy, the astrology and the magic together.

Two registers sit inside the count. On the learned side, the nissaya katha — Nitsai katha thammapata, Panca nibat katha, Thatukatha — Pali verse glossed and parsed for study. On the efficacious side, the sainyasat katha — Katha ongkan, Katha o, Katha sao hum, and the untitled bundles labelled Katha tang tang, "various katha." The learned katha is read; the efficacious katha is deployed.

Its physical profile breaks the scholastic mould in a telling way. Support is palm-leaf (102) against a very heavy mulberry-paper (75) — far more paper than the canonical or grammar corpora, exactly as one expects of formulae that were opened and used rather than shelved, though nowhere near as paper-heavy as the nyan shelf, where it runs 67 to 7. Script is 92% Tham Lanna (164 of 179) but with a notable 19 monolingual Pali witnesses — the katha is Pali, so a share needs no vernacular at all. It reaches back to 1549 and forward to 1974, with 68 witnesses carrying a date at all, and 73 of the 179 are flagged research-priority. Provenance leads at Nan (50), Phrae (41) and Lampang (37); holdings lead at Wat Sung Men (38) but spread widely — Wat Si Mongkhon (16), Wat Lai Hin Luang (15), Wat Phra That Lampang Luang (12).

Inference — set that against the nyan profile and the contrast is the finding. Katha is held in strength by the great scriptorium at Wat Sung Men, which holds almost no yantra at all; the drawn craft lives at the smaller working temples of Nan and Lampang. The spoken half of the technology was collectable by a library. The drawn half was not.

Notes

• The household-manual signature. Look at the bundled titles: Nyan lae katha (yantra and katha), Katha tang tang, Sainyasat, Tholanisan, Katha tang tang, Su khwan cao fa. Katha travels bound to yantra, holasat and su khwan soul-calling — the recurring ritual-manual object where formula, diagram and calendar share one book. When a katha title also names a nyan or a sainyasat element, the object is almost certainly a working wichaa manual, not a scholastic reader.
• The alias problem is acute here. Katha / gāthā / gatha and the compounds (Kathapan, katha ongkan) fragment across transliterations; the count here is a heuristic title-match and is indicative, not exact. A dedicated pass to normalise the spellings, and to separate the nissaya katha from the sainyasat katha, is the obvious next step and would split a learned tradition from an efficacious one.
• A crawl priority in its own right. Because katha is the operative verb of the wichaa — the actual words that do the work — it deserves targeted collection: any manuscript that records what was said is a primary source for the living tradition this archive documents. The printed treatises supply the search image: look for the two-part recipe grammar (formula, then "คาถานี้ … ดีแล"), for heart-mantra indexes, and for Itipiso recombinations forward and reversed.
• Where the seams run. The named repertoire slots — heart-syllables filed under a hero's name — are on the Khun Phaen page; reversal and mirror-work on paṭiloma; the junglefowl and bird formulas on kai; the teacher-lineage that licenses any of it on lersi. Katha is not a subject those pages borrow from. It is the thing they are each made of.

What the bots have noticed

Auto-derived from the catalogue and the curiosity bots — refreshed automatically, not hand-written. Each note links to its finding.

• Already legible to a machine — The manuscripts with the most recognised Thai text — the leading edge of the whole point: making a living tradition readable to a model and not only to a scholar. see the finding →
• Where the drawn tradition is thickest — Manuscripts carrying the most diagram pages — the yantra, cosmological charts, and talismanic figures that are drawn, not written. see the finding →