Why so many Buddha statues touch the ground with one hand
In countless statues the Buddha sits with his right fingertips resting on the earth. The gesture recalls the night of his awakening, when the tempter Mara challenged his right to enlightenment, and he called the earth itself as witness. Mara is Buddhism's great adversary: part demon, part metaphor for everything that keeps minds trapped.
The name comes from a Sanskrit root meaning to die, and Māra literally means causing death, a relative of an Indo-European root that stretches across many languages. A figure called Mara the evil slayer already appears in the Atharva Veda, dated to 1200 to 1000 BCE, so his origins are Hindu, but it was Buddhism that developed and spread his symbolism. He stands for death, rebirth and desire, and the monk Nyanaponika Thera described him as the personification of forces working against enlightenment.
Tradition divides him into metaphorical forms: Mara as the destructive emotions of greed, hate and delusion; Mara as the whole of conditioned existence; and Mara as a celestial being of the sensual realm who tried to stop Siddhartha on the night of his awakening, attacking with an army and then with alluring women. In some tellings those are his three daughters, named Thirst, Aversion and Desire, who came of their own accord after his defeat and were simply brushed aside. Early Buddhists read him both literally and psychologically, as the source of the lust, hesitation and fear that disrupt meditation.
Mara also serves as a pointed critique of rival beliefs. Even the gods of the Brahma world, free of sensual craving, fall under his sway by imagining they are eternal. When Baka Brahma boasts of his unchanging kingdom, the Buddha tells him it will decay once the conditions behind it run out. In another sutta Mara speaks through a lesser god to urge obedience to the Great Brahma, and the Buddha vanishes into a realm that supposedly all-seeing deity cannot perceive.
Some stories let him repent. Zen texts tell how the monk Upagupta, after Mara slipped a necklace onto him, returned a garland with a grisly secret that no one could remove until Mara took refuge in the Buddha's teaching. He resurfaces in modern culture too, from Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light to a 2020 song by Jack Garratt about intrusive thoughts.
Source: Mara (demon)
