Explaining the Buddha's Hair

People in traditional Buddhists lands are used to seeing statues of the Buddha at least somewhere almost every day in a roadside shrine, in a publication and they may have a statue or a picture of him on their budugey at home.

- BHANTE S. DHAMMIKA OF AUSTRALIA

Hair is the long, slender filamentous strands that grow out of the body. In keeping with the understanding of his time, the Buddha usually made a distinction between head hair (kesa) and body hair (loma). Body hair included the eyebrows, eye lashes, nose hair, facial hair, pubic hair, and the hair in the armpits.

Hair has long had a social, religious, erotic and psychological significance. Sikhism teaches that men should not cut their hair or beard, while the Old Testament forbids cutting the hair on the side of the head or the edge of the beard (Leviticus 19:27) and the New Testament condemns long hair on males as unnatural (1 Corinthians 11,14). In several religions women must conceal their hair with a veil or wig.

The ancient Indian tradition considered hair to be one of the five types of human beauty, and glossy black head hair and the line of soft down between the pubis and navel had a strong erotic appeal.

The coiffeur’s art was quite sophisticated by the Buddha’s time and both men and women paid a great deal of attention to their hair. Women favored parting their hair in the middle, wearing plait and applying sandal oil to it both to perfume it and to make it glisten. The courtesan Ambapali would wear her glossy-black hair curled at the ends, with flowers in it, well-parted with a comb, decorated with gold ornaments and adorned with plaits.

When Nanda left home to become a monk, he looked back and saw his girlfriend with her hair half-combed, an image that later he couldn't get out of his mind. For men, sikhabandha consisted of twisting their long hair and a long cloth together and then tying it around the head into a turban. Boys would wear five topknots or buns called culaka and women would sometimes have a jeweled diadem attached to their hair.