Siddham Ha 𑖮

Ha is the forty-seventh and last letter of the Siddham syllabary, the voiced aspirate, made in the throat with the vocal cords engaged. Its position at the end is a statement about the sound rather than an accident of arrangement: the phoneticians class it apart from the stops and apart from the sibilants and put it last, so the recitation closes where it began, at the back of the mouth.

The letter is common in the vocabulary, and it forms conjuncts with the nasals and the semivowels in which it is frequently written second, in a reduced form beneath the letter it follows.

In East Asian esoteric Buddhism ha is one of the five seed syllables of the elements, standing for wind, in the fourth position of the five-tiered stupa. The seed syllable of Amitabha is also built on it, with an r beneath, the vowel i above and the visarga after, and that syllable is among the most widely written of all the seed syllables in Japan, because of how widely Amitabha is honoured there.

It is the letter that closes the consonant table in the other Brahmic scripts descended from the same source as well, so a reader who knows one of those orders knows where to expect it in the rest.

Its place at the end gives it a part in how the table is named. A syllabary is frequently referred to by its first and last members, and the arrangement running from the first vowel to this letter is what a teacher means by the whole of it. Reciting from the one to the other is what completes the recitation.

Siddham stopped being written in India. The hands descended from Gupta Brahmi continued to develop there and became the scripts of the north, and the particular form that had been carried east was superseded at home like any other stage of a living tradition. Nothing was lost from the Indian point of view, because what replaced it did the same job.

It survived because it had been taken somewhere it could not be replaced. In China and then in Japan the script was needed for one purpose, writing Sanskrit syllables that were not to be translated, and no local script could do that job, so there was never a successor for it to be superseded by. Shingon and Tendai kept it in liturgical use, the shittan scholars kept it as a subject, the stonemasons and woodcarvers kept it in the open air, and the printers multiplied it.

The result is a script preserved by a tradition that did not speak its language, for a purpose the language itself had not been shaped for, in a country a long way from where it was made. It is now written by calligraphers, cut on grave markers, printed on charms, taught in temples, studied by philologists and encoded for computers, and the forty-seven letters are the same forty-seven the Sanskrit phoneticians set out, in the same order, describing the same mouth.