Ham

Ham is the seed syllable (bija mantra) of vishuddha, the throat chakra, in the chakra system of tantric and hatha yoga. Each principal centre in the scheme has a governing element, a lotus of a set number of petals, and a seed sound for meditation; vishuddha, the pure one, is assigned to the element ether or space and to a sixteen-petalled lotus, and Ham is the sound by which the meditator focuses upon and is held to activate it. The centre is associated in the tradition with speech, sound and communication, an apt link for the throat, and its element, the subtle space or ether from which sound arises, is the most refined of the five. Like the other seed syllables, Ham is used as pure sound rather than as a meaningful word, in inward recitation and visualisation, and its assignment belongs to the medieval tantric system preserved in the later yoga texts.

Ham 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 Vishuddha chakra, the throat centre, traditionally visualised as a sixteen-petalled lotus and associated with the ether or space element and with speech, truthful communication and purification. In the scheme's ascending sequence of seed syllables, Lam for the root centre, Vam for the sacral, Ram for the navel, Yam for the heart and Ham for the throat, the pattern typically continues upward to Om at the brow centre (Ajna), with the crown centre (Sahasrara) traditionally held to correspond to no fixed syllable but to silence itself.

Ham is the seed of vishuddha, the throat center, ruled by ether or space in Purnananda Yati's 1577 Shat chakra nirupana, the same source that fixes the rest of the six chakra scheme in this atlas, and its sixteen petals are explained there as carrying the sixteen Sanskrit vowels, a detail that ties this chakra explicitly to speech and the alphabet in a way the other centers are not.

Because vishuddha is specifically the speech center, its bija has drawn more grammatical commentary than most of the others, and the central dispute concerns whether ham should be read as related to hamsa, the swan or goose that is also a common symbol for the individual soul and appears in the unrelated breath practice so ham described elsewhere in this atlas. Some later devotional commentary links the two, treating vishuddha's seed as evidence that speech and the breath soul are connected faculties housed at neighboring points in the subtle body. Scholars working from Purnananda's Sanskrit directly generally reject that link as a later, popular conflation rather than something the text itself asserts, on the ground that the Shat chakra nirupana derives its sixteen chakra seeds and its main six chakra seeds from separate parts of its alphabetic scheme, the matrika system, with no textual indication that ham the throat seed and ham or hamsa the breath syllable are meant to be read together. The confusion is understandable given the identical spelling once diacritics are dropped, but the two are treated in the Tantric source material as belonging to different systems entirely.