Sixteen in Other Reckonings

Chinese Buddhism venerates the Sixteen Arhats, the disciples charged with remaining in the world to guard the teaching until the next Buddha; the group was later expanded to eighteen in East Asian art. In the tarot the sixteenth trump is the Tower, struck by lightning, and modern numerology treats sixteen as one of its karmic-debt numbers, read as the ruin of the ego and its painful renewal, a twentieth-century doctrine, not an ancient one. Sixteen long served as a practical base for subdivision, surviving in the sixteen ounces of a pound and the sixteen annas of the old rupee, because a number that halves cleanly four times is convenient for trade. The symbolic sixteen, though, is chiefly the Indian one of the complete sixteen phases.

Outside any numerological system, sixteen is also the age most widely marked in American and British popular culture as a threshold of independence, the sweet sixteen birthday, an entirely secular convention with no connection to the Indian sixteen kalas or the Buddhist Arhats already described; it illustrates how a number can carry an independently invented modern milestone alongside genuinely ancient traditional weight, the two simply coexisting rather than descending from one another.