Siddham Ra 𑖨

Ra is the second of the four semivowels and it behaves unlike any other consonant in the script. Standing before another consonant it is written as a mark above the syllable rather than as a letter in the line; following one it is written as a mark below. So the same sound appears in two reduced forms as well as in its full one, and neither reduced form resembles the letter.

That makes it one of the first things a reader of Siddham has to learn and one of the commonest sources of error for a learner. A mark above a syllable and a mark below it look like diacritics and are not: they are a consonant, and the syllable they belong to has to be read with the r in the position the mark indicates rather than wherever it falls on the page.

The sound is extremely frequent, both alone and in clusters, and the paired mark above the line is one of the most visible features of a Siddham page.

In East Asian esoteric Buddhism ra is one of the five seed syllables of the elements, where it stands for fire, so it is also among the letters most often cut in stone and written on wooden tablets in Japan, in the third position of the five-tiered stupa.

Because its two reduced forms are marks rather than letters, they are the parts of a syllable most likely to be dropped by a careless copyist or lost to damage on a manuscript. A missing mark above a syllable removes a consonant without leaving a gap in the line, which is a much harder error to notice than a missing character.

Beside the phonetic order there is a second Buddhist arrangement of syllables entirely, the arapacana, named from its opening five: a, ra, pa, ca, na. It runs to forty-two syllables and it is not ordered by articulation at all. Its sequence is generally thought to reflect the order of the Kharosthi script, which was used in the northwest of the subcontinent and in Central Asia and which is unrelated to the Brahmi family in its letterforms.

Its function in the texts is mnemonic. Each syllable heads a doctrinal statement, so the sequence of syllables carries a sequence of teachings, and reciting the list recalls the whole set. Arrangements of that kind appear in several Mahayana works, and the arapacana is associated in particular with Manjushri, who is invoked in a form named from it.

Its existence is a useful corrective to the impression the letter tables give. The Indian phonetic order is a description of a sound system; the arapacana is a memory device built on syllables, indifferent to articulation, and derived from a different script tradition. Both circulated in Buddhist literature at the same time and neither displaced the other, because they were doing different jobs. A syllabary is not one kind of object.