This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The study of what a hand and its fingers are held to mean or to do runs through at least two largely separate documented traditions that an entry keeps apart rather than blending: Western chiromancy, whose planetary finger scheme was systematized in print from the sixteenth century onward and further developed by nineteenth century French writers such as d'Arpentigny and Desbarrolles, and the Buddhist mudra tradition, whose symbolic hand gestures are documented in sculpture and ritual practice across South and East Asia centuries earlier still.
E. Dale Saunders' dedicated study of mudra in Japanese Buddhist sculpture documents how a specific gesture, fingers held in a precise, named configuration, carries a fixed doctrinal meaning within its own iconographic tradition, a visual vocabulary read by a trained eye from a statue or a painting rather than a system of character reading applied to an individual's living hand, which is the documented difference in kind between mudra and Western chiromancy even where both traditions assign meaning to a finger's position.
An entry uses this documented scholarship to keep each tradition's own history, method and claimed subject distinct, naming a finger's planetary reading as chiromancy's own claim and a finger's role in a named mudra as the separate, independently documented Buddhist tradition's own claim, rather than presenting either as evidence for the other.