Shakyamuni Buddha Head Statue

Every curl on this head turns the same way.

That is not a carving habit, it is a specification. Hair curling to the right is one of the thirty-two marks of a great man, the old checklist of physical signs a Buddha is held to carry, and carvers have been copying it for two thousand years. The Chinese name is 螺髮, luófà, spiral hair, after the shape of a conch shell. The account behind it is that Siddhartha cut his long hair off with a sword when he walked out of the palace, it grew back short and curled, and it never needed cutting again.

The mound beneath the curls is the ushnisha, the mark of expanded wisdom, and the dot at the brow is the urna. None of it is decoration. Each one is a specific claim about what the figure is.

Three colourways over the same unglazed terracotta face and chest: ochre, slate blue, and a pale green-grey. The robe is left matte and slightly rough where the clay was not smoothed.

A manji (卍) sits raised at the centre of the chest. It is the old Asian auspicious mark, found on Buddha figures from India to Japan, and it predates the twentieth-century European use most people think of first by several thousand years.

For a desk, a tea table, or a shelf that needs one still thing on it.

Where to place a Buddha statue

Desk, tea table, shelf or meditation corner. Buddha figures are traditionally kept above waist height and never at floor level, and feng shui adds that one should face into the room rather than at a wall, and should not sit in a bedroom or a bathroom.

Ceramic chips, so keep it back from an edge, and a soft cloth is all it needs.