________________
20
does not correspond either in its wording or in its order to Malayagiri's list, which is more than a thousand years later.
Comparing the Jaina with the Buddhist laksanas, we first notice that - after some general features such as physical constitution, beautiful shape, condition of the flesh, purity and shine of the bodily appendages - the Jains treat the particulars of the body from top to bottom. There also occur some duplications and variants. Further, the laksanas are not always identical with those of the Buddha, and their description most often does not contain simple compounds like dīghanguli 'having long fingers resp. toes' or eni-jangho 'with antelopelike legs', but varnakas, i.e. in principle endless units of metrical prose. Thus, the depiction of the hair on Mahāvīra's head is a compound three and a half lines long in Latin transliteration. Strikingly, the compiler of this tradition and the redactor of the Aupapātika were not worried by the fact that, according to tradition, Mahāvīra at his pabbajjā pulled out his hair in five tufts - a praxis that may still take place when a novice enters the order, but otherwise seems to have fallen into disuse nowadays. In this connection mention may be made of the name Kesi (in the Rāyapasenaijja) which is peculiar for a monk.
The removal of one's own hair means the renunciation of sexuality, just as baldness or cutting off someone else's hair means castration as a punishment for adultery. Thus, e.g. Indra branded his son and charioteer bald after the latter's intimacy with Indra's wife Sacī.158 The foregoing is also founded on a concept that the late London Latinist Onians proved, inter alia, in Greek culture in his highly erudite study
The Origins of European Thought - sperm was for the Ancients a fluid which, like the soul, originated in the head. Its abundance - says Aristotle in his Problemata 867a 23 sqq. - causes the growth of hair. This would explain that a person about to join a religious order and thus to give up a layman's sexual activity, cuts off his hair. In this way, and by abstinence, the sperm accumulates, producing a kind of hydrocephalus - a protuberance more or less visible on pictures and statues of the Buddha and the Jina: the uşnişa. Further, as Hertha Krick (1982: 88 sq.) points out, the ritual haircut connects dedication to the deity by sacrificing the Self and returning vital power with separation from the past in order to be prepared for a new life period.
The fact that, in spite of cutting off or pulling out their hair, both are nevertheless depicted with hair may be taken with Wendy O'Flaherty (1980: 45)159 to mean that "the rich supply of semen stored in the
158 JB 3,199. 159 She apparently refers to articles by E.R. Leach and G. Obeyesekere, the former of
which is missing in the bibliography (p. 356), whereas the latter is not available to me.