From A to Ha: What the Kashmir Shaiva Schools Make of the Arc

Because a stands at the head of the varnamala and ha at its end, the series can be read as an arc running from the first sound to the last, and the non-dual Shaiva traditions of Kashmir do read it that way. In their treatment the two letters joined by the nasal point spell the word aham, the ordinary Sanskrit word for I, and the whole alphabet enclosed between them is understood as the self-utterance of consciousness rather than as a writing convention: the letters are the matrika, the little mothers, and the series is the garland from which the manifest world proceeds.

Andre Padoux's study of the concept of the word in the Hindu Tantras sets out how those schools developed the reading and how much their arrangements of the same fifty letters differ from one another and from other Tantric traditions. This atlas records the reading as belonging to those schools and does not assert it in its own voice. What it does assert about the letter is what the grammarians state: that it is the thirty-third consonant, that it is a voiced breath grouped with the sibilants in the ushman class, that it closes the table, and that its written form descends through the Nagari hands from a Brahmi original. With this letter the seeding of the Devanagari varnamala in this atlas is complete at forty-seven letters, fourteen vowels and thirty-three consonants.