THE BUDDHA’S EAR
LOBES
The ear lobe
(kaṇṇapatta) is the soft nodule that hangs below the pinna
of the outer ear. On both ancient and modern Buddha statues in all cultures the earlobes are depicted as
elongated and usually with a hole in them. Most Buddha statues are
meant to be symbols of the enlightened state as much as they are
portraits of the Buddha himself. However, the elongated ear lobes
on statues are the survival of a distant memory of what the Buddha
actually looked like. In ancient India men
and women commonly wore ear plugs. Children’s ear lobes were
pierced and a small clay cylinder was put in the holes. As the
child grew, increasingly large cylinders were put in the lobes
until they had stretched enough to accommodate plugs with diameters
of up to 6 centimetres. Hundreds of these objects have been found
by archaeologists and are displayed in some museums in India.
Prince Siddhattha would have worn such ear
plugs when he was a lay man and would have taken them off when he
renounced the world, leaving his ear lobes
elongated.
Ear Ornaments of
Ancient India, Michel Postel,
1989.