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.