Also called: Hasta Samudrika Shastra · हस्त सामुद्रिक शास्त्र · Hast Rekha Shastra · हस्तरेखा शास्त्र · Śārīraka Śāstra · Skanda system · Samudrik Shastra · Hasta Samudrika · Hastrekha Vigyan

Where on the hand: The whole hand — palm, mounts, lines, fingers, fingertips and wrist — read as one field of bodily marks. · The parent discipline within which hand reading sits; it reads the whole body, of which the hand is one branch.

What it looks like: Not a mark but the discipline itself: the reading of the entire hand surface as a map of small line-figures set among the major lines and fleshy mounts. · Not a mark — the frame. Features are analysed by elevation, depression, elongation, diminution, colour, texture, hair and marks, and classified against the five elements: *Agni* (fire), *Vayu* (air), *Jal* (water), *Akash* (ether) and *Prithvi* (earth).

Sāmudrika Śāstra is the Indian science of bodily marks, traditionally attributed to the sage Samudra, from whom it takes its name. Its hand-specific branch is Hasta Samudrika Shastra or Hast Rekha Shastra. A parallel southern system, the Śārīraka Śāstra or Skanda system attributed to Kartikeya, recognises up to 153 lines on the palm and is emphasised in South India. Within this frame the auspicious symbols (shubh chinha) are read as fragments of the mahāpuruṣa inventory appearing on ordinary hands. · Literally "the knowledge of body features", and by tradition the teaching of Samudra, the ocean-deity, who is said to have read the marks on the body of Vishnu. Its core premise is that every natural or acquired bodily mark encodes its owner's psychology and destiny — the body is a legible text.

Read with care: TRANSLITERATION SCHEME. This reference does not use one consistent scheme, and the collisions fall on its most frequent terms: चक्र appears as both 'Cakra' and 'Chakra'; शंख as Śaṅkha / Shankh / shankh; त्रिशूल as Triśūla / trishūl / Trishul; सामुद्रिक as 'Sāmudrika Śāstra', 'Hast Samudrika Shastra' and 'Samudrik shastra'. Anusvara and conjunct doublets (अङ्कुश/अंकुश, चन्द्र/चंद्र, मन्दिर/मंदिर) appear within single entries. Read the Devanagari as authoritative and the roman as approximate. LINEAGE — corrected. This atlas previously implied that modern hast-rekhā descends from the Sanskrit texts. That is too strong. Palm-figure reading is a genuine and ancient stratum of sāmudrika (Bṛhat Saṃhitā 68 runs the whole male body and reaches the palm only in its closing verses), but palm-LINE divination as a distinct practice is later: Kenneth Zysk (The Indian System of Human Marks, Brill 2015) dates the pāṇilekhā chapter of the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna to the latter half of the 9th century CE, and traces the system through the Gārgīyajyotiṣa (1st c. CE) to the Samudrika-tilaka (c. 1160–75). The mount system itself — pads named for planets, with Rahu and Ketu added — has no basis in the Sanskrit texts at all; those texts have no mounts. It is a Greek/Western planetary import. Zysk's framing is a three-way exchange between India, Mesopotamia and Greece, not an unbroken indigenous line.