Ma as the Closing Sound of Om

The letter is the sound that closes Om when that syllable is taken apart into three. The Mandukya Upanishad develops the analysis furthest, correlating a with the waking state, u with dream and m with deep sleep, and the silence that follows the three with a fourth state it names only as the fourth. Later commentary built extensively on that scheme, and it is the source of most of the further correspondences attached to the syllable in the Vedantic literature. The correlation belongs to that text and to its long commentarial tradition, and this atlas records it as theirs rather than as a property of the letter. Grammar supplies the reason the analysis is possible at all. Om is written with the vowel o and a nasal, and o is what results when a and u combine under the ordinary rules of sandhi that Sanskrit applies everywhere; taking the syllable apart into three sounds is therefore reading it back through the rule that produced it.

In the Tantric arrangement of the alphabet as a garland of matrika this letter is one of the fifty counted in the series, and the anusvara is counted separately as one of the two additional marks that complete the fifty. Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras sets out how the schools order and interpret that series and how far their arrangements differ from one another; what any one school attributes to this letter belongs to that school.