Siddham Va 𑖪

Va is the fourth and last of the semivowels, the labial one, and the phoneticians pair it with the vowel u. With it the block of four closes and the order moves on to the sibilants and the aspirate.

Its written form is close enough to that of the voiced labial stop in many hands that the two are regularly confused in manuscripts, a difficulty that follows the letter across the whole Brahmic family and is one of the standing problems in editing a Buddhist text preserved in any of these scripts.

The sound is common, and the letter participates in the rules that turn a vowel into its consonantal counterpart, so a word ending in u followed by one beginning with a vowel produces it constantly. It also enters conjuncts freely, taking a reduced form below the letter it follows.

In East Asian esoteric Buddhism the syllable built on it, the letter with the nasal mark above, is the seed syllable of Mahavairocana in the Diamond Realm arrangement, the counterpart of the letter a in the Womb Realm. Va is also one of the five seed syllables of the elements, standing for water, in the second position of the five-tiered stupa.

The confusion with the voiced labial stop matters more here than it would elsewhere, because this letter carries a seed syllable. A syllable misread by one letter names a different thing, or nothing at all, and unlike a word in a sentence it has no context to correct it. That is one reason the reference charts and the reading traditions were transmitted alongside the shapes rather than after them.

Japanese esoteric Buddhism works with two great mandalas, taken from two texts, and they are used together as a pair. The Womb Realm mandala descends from the Mahavairocana Sutra and the Diamond Realm mandala from the Vajrasekhara, and the two were transmitted as a single system by the masters at the Tang capital from whom Kukai received it. Shingon temples hang them facing each other.

Mahavairocana stands at the centre of both, and each arrangement gives him a seed syllable of its own: the letter a in the Womb Realm, and the letter va with the nasal mark in the Diamond Realm. The pairing of the two syllables mirrors the pairing of the two mandalas, and it is one of the clearest cases of the Siddham letters carrying structure rather than merely labelling something.

Mandalas composed of syllables rather than of figures exist for both, with a seed syllable in each position where a figure would otherwise stand. Such a mandala is fully legible to somebody trained in the tradition and completely opaque to anyone else, which is a fair description of the whole apparatus.

What the atlas records here is the arrangement and its documentation. The use of these mandalas is initiatory, transmitted within a teacher relationship, and describing what is depicted is not the same as describing what is done.