 Shingon ritual practice attempts to trigger this realization through the mantric pronunciations of the five basic syllables of Sanskrit – A,Va, Ra, Ha, Kha, (and sometimes adding a sixth syllable Hūṃ) –, emulating the primordial utterance of Dainichi. This is to attune the practitioner to the inter-resonance of the basic elements underlying all phenomena, so that he may hear the “true words” being preached by Dainichi. The mantra’s power is in its incomprehensibility to human understanding. Its significance cannot be explained analytically or understood conceptually; it is instead to be experienced in ritual. Through ritualized experience, these intellectually incomprehensible sounds, in the self-deconstruction of any assumed or projected meaningfulness, paradoxically evoke the emptiness they mean and the emptiness of their meaning, the emptiness of all in their mutual non-obstruction and interdependence. Its incomprehension makes explicit the materiality and dynamic process involved behind the emergence of signs. This undermines any linguistic assumption of the substantiality of things and hence any delusory attachments to them. What is invoked is a paradigm shift from seeing the surface pattern of things to seeing their underlying emptiness. (Abe 1999, 297–98) In addition to mantric intonations, another form of practice was a-ji meditation, wherein the written form of the Sanskrit letter A is treated as an object of meditation. The purpose of such concentrated attention on the material form of a sign is to gain some sort of an experiential comprehension of its esoteric significance, somewhat similar to that of mantra incantation as just discussed. However we must note the special significance of the particular letter A, which we shall discuss below.