The word that runs through the Ashokan inscriptions more than any other begins with this consonant. In the Prakrit of the edicts it is spelled with a doubled aspirated dental, and it names what the emperor claims to be promoting: a moral order, described in the inscriptions in terms of restraint, generosity, truthfulness and care for living creatures, and deliberately framed in language that no single religious community owns. The edicts announce officers appointed to oversee it, describe its practice as superior to ceremony, and set out the emperor's own conduct as an example of it.
The Sanskrit root behind the word means to place, to hold or to support, and it is among the most productive in the language. Its derivatives cover a wide field: what is established, what upholds, a container, a receptacle, a stratum. The same root supplies the terms for concentration in the meditative vocabulary and the words for the treasury and the storehouse in the administrative one.
For a reader of early Brahmi the letter is therefore unavoidable. It appears in the opening formula of edict after edict, in the titles of officials and in the abstract vocabulary the inscriptions use to describe what they are for. Learning to recognise it is one of the first steps in reading the Mauryan material at all, and it is attested in enormous quantity from the earliest surviving inscriptions onward.