The History of Buddhist Thought c4.10

c4.10

The prominence on the head is one of a Buddha’s thirty-two bodily marks, which appear also on bodhisattvas in their last birth (below, p. 142). One of these is that he is said to be *uṣṇīṣa-śīrṣa* or *uṇhīsa-sīsa*, ‘turban-headed,’ a term which as applied to a bodily mark can only mean having the head in the shape of a turban. This is how it was interpreted by the later Indian artists, who represented a prominence of the skull covered with short curls, and it has been assumed that they were trying to copy the bunched-up hair of the Gandhāra figures. But this mark is mentioned in the list of marks as given by all known schools, and these lists must have been already in existence when the Gandhāra art arose. There is no reason to think that these artists were ignorant of the tradition, and the probability is that the bunched-up hair of the Gandhāra figures is their way of indicating the mark without making it appear as a deformity.