The Sound at the Crown

Ah is recorded in this atlas as the seed sound of sahasrara, the crown centre, following one of the schemes that assign a syllable to the highest of the chakras. In the classical chakra system the crown, pictured as a thousand-petalled lotus at the top of the head, is the goal of the ascent of the subtle body and the place where, in many tantric accounts, the awakened energy (kundalini) raised from the root centre reaches union with the divine; it is often treated as beyond the elemental correspondences of the lower centres and associated with the fullness of sound rather than a single element.

Different lineages describe its sound differently, some connecting the crown with the pure resonance of Om or with a silence beyond sound, and Ah, a fundamental open vowel that also carries meaning in Tibetan Buddhist practice as a seed of enlightened speech, is one of the sounds so assigned. The variation itself reflects the fact that the chakra correspondences were elaborated in several tantric traditions rather than fixed in a single canonical list.