Also called: textual substrate · the shubh chinha corpus

Where on the hand: No palm position — this is the bibliography that stands behind every symbol in the catalogue.

What it looks like: Not a mark. The written tradition from which the symbol-list descends, spanning Sanskrit encyclopaedia, Purāṇa, Pāli sutta, Jain Āgama, Gauḍīya commentary and colonial-era Western manuals.

The auspicious-marks tradition is not a single canon. It is a layered body of Sanskrit classical lists, Purāṇic enumerations, Buddhist and Jain inventories of a Great Being's marks, late Hindi compilations, and colonial bridge-texts. Each layer names marks the others do not, and the modern Hindi lists add many symbols with no classical warrant.

Read with care: The classical Sanskrit corpus is much narrower than the modern lists: Bṛhat Saṃhitā and the Garuḍa Purāṇa together yield roughly 30–35 distinct marks. The modern Hindi '32/40 signs' lists add trishul, damaru, shivling, om, tilak, temple, mirror, plank, tomb, begging bowl and others that have no classical warrant. Both bodies are legitimate as tradition; they are not the same tradition. Source withdrawn: “Rāvaṇa Saṃhitā” cannot be substantiated as a text containing palmistry. There is no critical edition and no manuscript-catalogue entry; the name attaches to an Ayurvedic Arka-kalpa work, a tantric Ḍāmara-type compilation, and modern Hindi trade volumes — none with an attested hasta-rekhā section. Also: “Hasta Sañjīvanī” is a 20th-century Hindi manual by Dr Suresh Chandra Mishra, not a traditional Sanskrit text. The 567-stanza work on male palmistry attributed to Vālmīki traces only to secondary citation and no manuscript. The Śārīraka/Skanda “153 lines” system attributed to Kārttikeya circulates only on palmistry sites.