page_title: Buddha footprint
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Buddha footprint / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Amaravati Archaeological Museum is a museum located in Amaravati, a village in Guntur district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
context_page_description: The footprint of the Buddha is an imprint of Gautama Buddha's foot or both feet. There are two forms: natural, as found in stone or rock, and those made artificially. Many of the "natural" ones are acknowledged not to be genuine footprints of the Buddha, but rather replicas or representations of them, which can be considered cetiya and also an early aniconic and symbolic representation of the Buddha.
context_section_description: The veneration of the feet of gurus or deities was commonplace in ancient India, placing one's head at or under their feet being a ritual gesture signifying a hierarchy. As cetiya, the Buddha's footprint was classified in a variety of ways. Some were uddesika, representational relics, and others were paribhogika, relics of use or of contact, and occasionally saririka, as though they were not just footprints but the Buddha's actual feet. Some of the depictions of the footprints may signify events in the life of the Buddha, but others may have been depictions of people worshipping at footprint shrines.
  To clarify: a footprint of the Buddha is a concave image of his foot (or feet), supposed to have been left by him on earth to purposefully mark his passage over a particular spot. The images of the Buddha’s feet are convex images which represent the actual soles of his feet, with all their characteristics. Following the traditional triple division of the cetiya, we can assume that the first form of the image of the Buddha’s feet – the concave one – is a sort of pāribhogika element, since it is indissolubly connected with the Tathāgata himself. The second one can be thought as an uddissaka element, since it was created by a devoted artist (or artists) to commemorate the Buddha, taking as its model a genuine footprint. But we can think of this second group, too, as a "pāribhogika by supposition", as noted by Chutiwongs.
  According to French scholar Paul Mus, the footprints were the type of magical objects which "enables one to act at a distance on people related to it."
caption: A stone depiction of ancient worship of Buddha Pada
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