Yam

Yam is the seed syllable (bija mantra) of anahata, the heart chakra, in the tantric and hatha-yoga chakra system. As with the other centres, anahata is meditated upon through an element, a lotus of a fixed number of petals, and a seed sound; it is associated with the element air and with a twelve-petalled lotus, and Yam is the sound used to concentrate upon and, in the understanding of the tradition, to enliven it. Its name, anahata, means unstruck, evoking a subtle sound produced without any two things striking together, and the centre is linked in the tradition with love and compassion. Like the other bijas, Yam is treated as sound rather than as translatable speech, employed in inward recitation and visualisation, and its assignment to the airy heart-centre derives from the medieval tantric scheme codified in the yoga literature and standard across its common forms.

Yam is identified in the same tantric physiological scheme, the Shatchakra Nirupana as transmitted through Sir John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power (1919), as the bija, or seed syllable, of the Anahata chakra, the heart centre, traditionally visualised as a twelve-petalled lotus and associated with the air element and with love, compassion and equilibrium between the lower, bodily centres and the higher, more purely mental ones above it. The Anahata centre's name is itself sometimes glossed as the "unstruck" sound, a reference in some commentarial traditions to a subtle, self-arising resonance said to be perceptible in advanced meditative states without any external striking or vibration, distinguishing it philosophically from ordinary, physically produced sound.

Yam is the seed of anahata, the heart center, assigned to air in the same 1577 compilation, Purnananda Yati's Shat chakra nirupana, that fixes the whole six chakra scheme used across these entries. Anahata's twelve petalled lotus and its name, unstruck, describing a sound produced without two things colliding, are part of Purnananda's elaboration, and the idea of an unstruck sound at the heart draws on an older Nada Yoga concept of subtle, self arising sound current in earlier Tantric and Yogic material, so the chakra's name preserves an older idea even where its placement in a six part map is the sixteenth century text's own contribution.

Translation and transmission here run into a genuinely unresolved dispute among scholars of Tantra over what a bija actually denotes linguistically. One school treats yam and the other chakra seeds as acoustically motivated, sounds whose phonetic qualities are held to resonate with the element or quality they represent, air's association with yam reasoned from the semi vowel's light, breathy articulation. A rival, more historically grounded position, associated with several twentieth century Indologists working on the Tantric alphabet systems called the matrikas, argues that bija assignments follow a formal alphabetic scheme, an ordered mapping of Sanskrit's phonemes onto ritual categories, rather than any perceived acoustic resemblance, so that yam's connection to air is systemic rather than sonic. Neither camp has produced decisive evidence, and popular yoga literature typically presents the acoustic explanation as settled fact when it is one contested reading among specialists.