The Development of Hindu Iconography c14.5

c14.5

¹ In India, many of the hand-poses were long stereotyped. Coomaraswamy observes, "Such motions must have been elaborated and codified at a very early date; and later on we find that the art of silent communication by means of signs, which is in effect a 'deaf and dumb language,' and just like the American Indian hand-language, was regularly regarded as one of the 'sixty-four arts' which every educated person should have knowledge of." He refers to Jātaka No. 546 (J. text, VI, 364) where the Bodhisattva judges the suitability of a woman for being his wife by communicating to her through the medium of a particular hand-sign (*hattha-muddā*); she understood it correctly and replied to him with another of her own; Coomaraswamy and Gopālakrishnāyya, *The Mirror of Gesture*, p. 24.