Divinity Atlas
Hands Names Anjali as Its Own Example, and Anjali's Page Supplies What Hands Does Not
Hands and Anjali are connected by one of only three links anywhere in this atlas linking its eastern-systems and the-body-and-its-centres sections. The link carries no note of its own, but it does not need one: Hands' own description already names Anjali by name as its leading example, "from the Anjali gesture of joined palms in prayer to the raised open palm of fearlessness," and Anjali's own page then supplies the detail Hands only gestures toward.
The General Principle
Hands sets out a cross-religious thesis: "the position of the hands, a mudra, is treated as doctrine made visible." Its own roll call runs well past Anjali, to "the Buddha's earth-touching gesture at the moment of enlightenment," the Christian laying on of hands "to transmit office or blessing directly through touch," the washing of hands in Islamic wudu, and the khamsa, the protective five-fingered amulet whose own name is disputed between and within the Jewish and Muslim communities that wear it. Anjali is named as one example among several, not worked out in any further detail on this page.
The Specific Case, in the Detail Hands Does Not Give
Anjali's own page supplies what Hands only names. It is "the ordinary gesture of greeting across the Indian subcontinent, secular as readily as sacred," and raising it changes its meaning by register: "at the heart for an equal, at the brow for a teacher or an elder, above the crown for the divine." Its own page also names a convention Hands never mentions: in Buddhist art, the gesture "belongs to worshippers, donors and attendant bodhisattvas rather than to the Buddha, who salutes no one," which makes the gesture, or its absence, "often the quickest way to read who in a crowded relief stands below whom." A reader of Hands alone learns that the gesture exists and matters; a reader of Anjali alone learns its grammar; only together do they show a general principle and the one worked example detailed enough to demonstrate it.
Where To Read More
- HandsThe general thesis: mudra as doctrine made visible, Anjali named as its own leading example
- AnjaliThe specific gesture, graded by register and read as a hierarchy convention in Buddhist art