Also called: Buddhapādamaṅgala · the 108 signs · the 132 signs

Where on the hand: Not on the palm — engraved or painted on the soles of Buddha-footprint monuments across South and Southeast Asia.

What it looks like: A grid of squares laid out across the sole, each square holding one small emblem, with a large dharmacakra at the centre of the composition.

Buddha footprints (buddhapāda) are engraved or painted with the 32, the 108, or the 132 auspicious signs. The definitive enumeration of the 108 is the Pāli Buddhapādamaṅgala, edited and translated by Claudio Cicuzza. Almost every symbol in the palmistry catalogue appears somewhere in this list — that is the point of the correspondence: the palmist's shubh chinha are a democratised version of the Buddha-foot inventory.

Read with care: Chronology correction: the claim that the palmist's shubh chinha are 'a democratised version of the Buddha-foot inventory' runs the wrong way. The Buddhapādamaṅgala is an anonymous Pali work most likely of 16th-century Ayutthaya; Bṛhat Saṃhitā 68 is 6th-century. The Indian palm lists precede it by a millennium. The shared membership reflects a common pan-Indian repertoire of auspicious objects, not descent — the same applies to the aṣṭamaṅgala overlap.