The Marks of a Great Being

Buddhist tradition describes the body of a Buddha or a universal monarch as bearing thirty-two major marks, the mahapurusha-lakshana, from the wheel-signs on the soles of the feet to the crown protuberance and the tuft between the brows; these are enumerated in the early texts and shape the iconography of Buddha images across Asia. The human adult also has thirty-two teeth, a fact folded into the marks in some lists. As a power of two, thirty-two reduces to five, and numerological readings treat it accordingly, but its two great traditional uses, the thirty-two paths of the Sefer Yetzirah and the thirty-two marks of the great being, are among the most developed number-schemes in Jewish and Buddhist thought, each mapping a totality onto the number.

Balliett's 1908 chart reduces thirty-two to five, change and the senses in the standard modern keyword list; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers, Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation all carried that root reading forward without developing a distinct compound meaning for thirty-two the way Cheiro did for numbers such as twenty-seven, so the American chart adds comparatively little to a number whose weight, in Jewish mysticism and in Buddhist iconography alike, is already fully accounted for above.