signsThe footprintबुद्धपद

said buddhapada, 'the Buddha's foot'

also: Buddhapada · Buddha footprint · Phra Phutthabat · Sri Pada

signSouth AsiaMainland Southeast AsiaChinaJapanIsland Southeast AsiaIndia Sri Lanka Thailand Cambodia Myanmar Japan Chinaconfidence mediumneeds checking

The print of a foot, or of two feet side by side, cut in stone or wood or painted. A dharmachakra is often set at the centre of the sole, or the 32, 108 or 132 auspicious signs of the Buddha are engraved or painted across it. There are two kinds and the tradition distinguishes them: prints found in stone or rock, and prints made by hand.

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When

from the aniconic period of Indian Buddhism; still made and still visited still carried cited

Period	pre-Greco-Buddhist India to the present
How the date is known	art-historical — dated by style
Note	No year is published in what was read. The source places the first examples in India at Sanchi and Bharhut in the pre-Greco-Buddhist phase, and separately dates the Chengzhou discovery to 701 CE and a Lanna teak buddhapada to the late 15th–early 16th century. A start year is not guessed here.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Plaque or tablet
Made of	Wood · Shell · Glass · Fired clay
Goes	On a wall · At the till
It says	a dharmachakra at the centre of the sole, or the 32, 108 or 132 auspicious signs of the Buddha
Counted	108
Note	count records the commonest of the three published mark-counts, not a fixed number.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by Buddhist practice, in which the marks on the sole are named auspicious signs
Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by Theravada communities in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, who read the swastika as the Buddha's footprintslisted twice because two sources make the claim in different words

The story

The footprint is a way of showing a person by showing where they stood. As a sculptural object it starts in India, in the pre-Greco-Buddhist phase, at sites like Sanchi and Bharhut — that is, in the period when the Buddha was represented by signs rather than by a body. Many of the prints found in rock are acknowledged within the tradition not to be prints of the Buddha's foot but replicas or representations, which can count as cetiya, relics.

The count is large. The Japanese scholar Motoji Niwa found more than 3,000 footprints, about 300 of them in Japan and more than 1,000 in Sri Lanka. The named sites include Sri Pada in Sri Lanka and Phra Phutthabat in Thailand, with more in Cambodia and Burma. In China, the discovery of a large footprint of the Buddha at Chengzhou during the Tang led the Empress Wu Zetian to declare a new era name in 701 CE — a footprint that reset the calendar.

One of the marks on the sole is a sign in its own right elsewhere in this atlas. In Buddhism the swastika is read as standing for the auspicious footprints of the Buddha, and a left-facing one is often imprinted on the chest, feet or palms of Buddha images. Theravada communities in Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia commonly associate the sign with the Buddha's footprints.

Portable versions exist. A Lanna buddhapada of the late fifteenth to early sixteenth century is teak decorated with mother of pearl and glass.

Inference — this is the only sign in this batch that is an absence rather than a thing: the shape of somebody who is no longer standing there. Whether it belongs among amulets at all depends on whether a thing you visit counts beside a thing you carry, and this atlas files it here because the small ones are carried.

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