Dha: The Letter That Opens Dharma and Dhyana

Dha is the nineteenth consonant of the varnamala, the voiced aspirated dental and the fourth member of the fourth varga. It opens two of the words most often carried untranslated into English from the Indian traditions. The first is the term for the order or duty that holds things in their proper place, a word whose sense differs substantially between the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions and which has an entry of its own in this atlas. The second is the term for sustained meditative absorption, which passed into Chinese as chan and from there into Japanese as zen, so that a school of Japanese Buddhism carries a transliteration of this Sanskrit word as its name. Both are examples of vocabulary that travelled with the traditions rather than being translated by them.

The letter itself is described by its coordinates in the table: dental, voiced, aspirated, fourth in the fourth class, immediately before the dental nasal. Its breathy voicing is the same feature that distinguishes the fourth member of every other class, and it is one of the sounds Sanskrit preserved from its Indo-European ancestor where most of the related languages did not. Neither word is unusual in its sounds and neither has any relation to the other beyond the letter they share. They are mentioned together because both belong to the small set of Sanskrit terms that English borrowed without translating, which is a fact about the history of English and about how these traditions travelled, rather than anything about the letter that happens to open them both.