Tibetan Ha ཧ

Ha is the twenty-ninth of the thirty consonants and opens the eighth and last line, which has only two members. It writes a voiceless glottal fricative, the h of English hat, and it carries high tone as an initial in modern Lhasa speech.

The line is short because the recitation has run out of material. Thirty letters do not divide into lines of four, and after seven full lines two remain: ha and the great a, which closes the alphabet. Whatever ordering principle governed the first four lines has long since been exhausted by the time a reciter arrives here, and the last line is simply the end.

Ha has one further office in the writing system, outside the thirty. Subjoined beneath a letter it is the device by which Tibetan writes the voiced aspirates of Sanskrit, so that ga with ha beneath it stands for the Sanskrit gha. That is part of the transcription apparatus rather than of Tibetan orthography proper, and it is taught separately.

Ha is also the base of one of the three syllables that stand for enlightened body, speech and mind in Tibetan Buddhism, which is the subject of the article beside this one.

Ha takes superscripts and the ra subscript, and it is not a prefix, a suffix, a superscript or a subscript. In the mechanics of the syllable it is an ordinary root letter, whatever weight the syllables built on it carry elsewhere.

Three syllables stand in Tibetan Buddhism for enlightened body, speech and mind. They are written on images, printed in texts, set on the reverse of paintings and inscribed on ritual objects, and the second and third of them are built on letters of the ordinary alphabet: the great a carries the second, and ha carries the third.

The writing is public. It is displayed openly, reproduced commercially, and shown in printed reference works and museum catalogues, and describing how the syllables are written asserts nothing about anybody and discloses nothing that is withheld.

The practice is not the writing. Within the Vajrayana traditions, the contemplative use of these syllables is transmitted by a teacher and, for a great many practices, under formal initiation, with the instruction given to those who have received it and not otherwise. That is a boundary the traditions themselves draw, and it is not a matter of secrecy for its own sake: the instruction is held to depend on the transmission.

The atlas observes it. These entries describe letters, shapes, and the objects the syllables appear on, and they record what is documented about their iconographic use. They do not reconstruct a practice, do not give instruction, and do not present a syllable as something a reader should use. Where a practice is closed, the atlas says so and stops, which is the only honest position available to a reference work.