Siddham Dha 𑖠

Dha is the voiced aspirated dental, breathy voiced, and it fills the fourth slot of the dental class. Unlike the corresponding letters in the palatal and retroflex classes it is common, standing in a large family of frequent roots and in several grammatical formations, so it is written constantly.

That is a useful corrective to the impression the table gives. The fourth slot of each of the five classes holds a letter of the same phonetic description, and the five of them differ enormously in how often they are needed: one is met on every page and another may not be met at all. The arrangement is by articulation, and the vocabulary distributes itself across the grid unevenly, which is a fact about the language rather than a flaw in the analysis.

In Buddhist texts specifically the letter is unavoidable, because it opens the word dharma and the long list of terms built on the same root. A page of doctrinal writing carries it many times over, and its shape is among the ones a reader of such material recognises fastest.

Like the other three voiced aspirates it has a character of its own rather than being derived from the plain voiced stop, which keeps the structure of the class legible on the page.

Doctrinal writing uses a small technical vocabulary very heavily, and Buddhist Sanskrit is an extreme case. A handful of terms carry most of the conceptual weight, each generating compounds, derivatives and technical senses, and a page of argument may return to the same three or four roots dozens of times.

That has a visible effect on a Siddham page. The letters and clusters that open the central terms recur far above their frequency in the language at large, and a reader develops an eye for them: the shape at the front of the word for the teaching, the cluster at the front of the word for knowledge, the syllables that open the terms for suffering, impermanence and the absence of self. Identifying the subject of a page precedes construing it.

The word dharma is the hardest case for anyone reading in translation, because it has a wide range of senses even inside one school and a wider one across them: the teaching, the truth, a duty, a phenomenon, an element of experience. Translators have used a dozen English words for it and none of them covers the range.

The atlas records the term and its sources rather than choosing among the readings, and where the schools take genuinely opposed positions on what it means, that disagreement is itself part of the record.