Siddham Ma 𑖦

Ma is the labial nasal, the last letter of the labial class, and with it the twenty-five stops are complete. What follows in the order are the semivowels, the sibilants and the aspirate, which the phoneticians treat as sounds of a different kind and group separately.

The letter is very common. It stands in a large number of roots, in the first person endings of the verb, in the accusative singular ending of a great many nouns and in the commonest of the pronouns, so it is among the letters a scribe writes most often. It also appears constantly in reduced form inside conjuncts.

Its place at the close of the stops is what makes the count of twenty-five a unit in the recitation rather than an arbitrary stopping point, and a learner reciting the table pauses there before beginning the second half of the consonant section.

Beyond the table, ma is the closing sound of Om in the old threefold analysis of that syllable, and the nasal mark that so many East Asian seed syllables carry represents the same nasal quality. A great many of the syllables written in Siddham on Japanese images end in it, one way or another.

The nasal mark and this letter are not the same thing, although they represent related sounds and both are commonly transliterated with an m. One is a letter of the table and the other is a mark that is not counted among the letters at all. A description of a seed syllable that confuses the two is describing something other than what is actually written.

Bonji is the Japanese word for Siddham characters used in this way, and it names a category of object more than a script. A bonji is a Sanskrit letter or syllable functioning as a sign: on a wooden grave tablet, a stone marker, a printed charm, a temple banner, a bell, a ritual implement, a mandala, or the base of a statue. It is written by people trained to write it, in a calligraphic tradition with its own brush conventions, and it is read by people who mostly cannot read Sanskrit.

That combination is unusual and worth being precise about. The letters are genuine, correctly formed and correctly assigned; the tradition that writes them knows exactly what they say. The audience is not expected to construe them, and the object works whether or not anyone does. What the letter carries in that setting is identification and dedication rather than sentence meaning.

It also means bonji circulate widely outside their tradition, on ornaments, clothing and tattoos, frequently miscopied and frequently misidentified, since a chart of syllables is easy to find and a training in the script is not. A syllable copied wrongly names a different figure or nothing at all. The atlas records what the letters are and what the tradition holds them to be, which is a different thing from recommending that anybody wear one.