The dove-footed characteric of nymphs in Ud 3.2 appear to be a beautiful characteristic of them. But how could it be the case ?
Do you have other ideas of what the Buddha was meaning by that ?
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It’s normally taken as referring to the colour of a dove’s feet, rather than to their anisodactylic form. Some translators have therefore rendered it as “pink-footed nymphs”. The Udāna commentary, however, says that their feet were actually red rather than pink. Their fine appearance is said to have been the result of the nymphs’ donation of foot oil to the disciples of Kassapa Buddha in a former life.
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Wait, really? I thought it was (originally) calling the devata’s feet “soft and white” (like a dove’s feathers) as that would be a hallmark of beauty and refinement in most traditional cultures.
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Well, at the risk of posting NSFW content, here’s why.
My word of the day, thanks!
So hear me out. I think it’s pretty clear that the main referent here is the color of the feet, which is associated with “rouged feet” (alattakakatā pādā) as a sign of beauty.
However, it’s often the case that birds have a mythological role as messengers of the gods, for obvious reasons: they fly down from the heavens. In this case, the dove, together with the owl, are seen as emissaries of Nirṛti, the goddess of dissolution. There’s a nice summary here:
The dove is typically seen as a bad of ill-omen, the sight of which is a harbinger of death.
Here’s the main Rig Vedic hymn, in the Jamison/Brereton translation. If you’re unable to easily read this screenshot, try the older translation online.
Notice that verse four talks about the footprint of a dove in the fireplace. Remembering that the fireplace is the home of Agni, the god of power and light, if a dove gets in your home and treads in your ashes, it’s definitely a sign of doom. Luckily, Āpastamba-gṛhya-sūtra 8.23.9 provides us with a handy ritual if such an ill-omen befalls us.
Again, I’m pretty sure the primary sense of the image in the Udana is simply that they have lovely pink, rouged feet. But at the same time, it is possible to imagine that the image has a subtle undercurrent: those delightful nymphs are in fact the hidden emissaries of Dissolution, their feet betraying the horrifying reality beneath the beguiling surface.
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Thank you Sujato that is quite a deep and impactful explanation that has me paranoid about doves now. 
Perhaps I will perceive them as respected birds of power…
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Although Sujato, I was reading #3 on that Apastambha ritual and it’s a terrible form of illegal unconsensual activity. Very bad idea for anyone! (Then I stopped reading, it may get worse).
Is there some grammatical subtlety that renders the notion that their feet actually looked like doves, i.e the whole body of the dove?
Doves are kind of shaped like feet, with the head being the ankle, the chest and body being the heel, and the tail being the toes.
perhaps it meant sort of smooth, rounded and with small toes? like a ballet shoe?
Not that I’m into that sort of thing 
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I know, the anti-dove thing is very weird. Those guys were these ferocious warriors who trampled half the world underfoot and they were just terrified of … doves?
It’s grammatically possible. The Pali is kakuṭapāda, “pigeon-feet”, which grammatically doesn’t distinguish between “whose feet are colored like pigeons” and “whose feet are shaped like pigeons”. Having said which, pretty sure it means the color.
Worth noting, I haven’t been able to find any other references to this feature in Sanskrit literature. Also, the word for “dove” is unusual. Normally it’s kapota, here it’s kakuṭa, which is only barely attested in Sanskrit.
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Oh, interesting. So, ancient Indians considered rouged feet beautiful? 
I guess it makes some kind of sense: pink is even more raw than white. Or, I guess I should say, it makes about as much sense as foot binding or breast augmentation or whatever other weird things people consider beautiful in different cultures 
Thanks! 
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They obviously did:
Thag7.1:1.1: “Alaṅkatā suvasanā,
Adorned with jewelry and all dressed up,
Thag7.1:1.2: māladhārī vibhūsitā;
with her garland and her makeup on,
Thag7.1:1.3: Alattakakatāpādā,
and her feet so brightly rouged:
Thag7.1:1.4: pādukāruyha vesikā.
the courtesan was wearing sandals.
At least Venerable Sundarasamudda was impressed, for a short moment anyway.
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Which led me to this passage from the Linga Purana (one of the major eighteen Puranas):
Suta Maha Muni indicated certain premonitions of untoward tidings and of death when human beings ought to intensify virtuous deeds as the last breathing might arrive. … a dream of a crow, or a kite or dove or any other meat-eating bird on a person’s head might presume death within six months…
Keep in mind that the sanskrit word for dove in the above passage is kapota(Kapota, Kāpota: 34 definitions). I’ll come back to this.
Now, regarding Bhante’s wisdomlib.org reference, I found it interesting that a dove, of all birds, would be in the same class as an owl or crow. That’s why I researched it further.
My husband and I keep up fanatically with feeding the birds around our yard. Because our neighborhood does not have lots of old trees (yet), we also get quite a few pigeons along with some mourning doves. (Please read the end of this post to acknowledge where all the old trees went.)
So I watch a lot of rock pigeons. One thing they are not is meat-eating.
I wondered about conflation of bird types: kite and dove.
Not being an ornithologist, I can’t say much about it; however, I did note from wikipedia that a kite is flesh-eating. So I have to think the original purana reference is to a kite and not a dove but some translation thing happened along the way?
All that being said, we are centered in a high-tech area; our neighborhood has many young families from India working here. (Mostly young but many parents have followed.)
I now wonder – with shock – what the presence of all these pigeons is like for my neighbors. It can’t be a good thing.
EDIT: Bear with me. Wisdomlib.org says that, in Dravidian:
Kakūṭa (ಕಕೂಟ):—[noun] the bird Turdus ginginianus.
Upon further research, I learned this is an outdated Latin form of the bird order passeriformes which includes “perching birds”. So the reference in the pāli (3x in KN, according to DPD), while commonly translated as dove-footed, may actually refer to a common perching bird in Northern India that is not a member of the bird order columbiformes (that of pigeons and doves).
Like, pigeons and doves don’t look like perching birds to me. When I take a gander at North Indian perching bird images (sorry, pun intended), the claws are clearly adapted for perching, unlike those of a pigeon or dove.
That’s an image of a Bank myna, for which I find this description on wikipedia:
They perch on livestock and live in crowded towns allowing close approach, often picking up scraps in markets and dumps.[6] They are vociferous and use a wide range of calls that include clucks, croaks, screeches, whistles and warbling elements.[8]
Bank mynas feed on grain, insects and fruits.
I can imagine a perching bird alighting on someone’s head, as we find that example in the purana passage above. Except that the English translation is dove. I can’t imagine a dove alighting on someone’s head. Let me know if you’ve ever seen that 
.
Does this mean that the sutta is referring, in fact, to their anisodactylic form (that word hopefully being spelled correctly)? And that the commentary is reflecting on the color of a North Indian perching bird rather than a dove? Or, the sutta may be referring to the color, as Bhante says, but in this case we’re really talking about the orange-reddish color of a perching bird.
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I’m sorry to say that the reason we don’t have tall trees is that the original ones were removed for the sake of putting in a neighborhood. The original inhabitants of these lands that were displaced by the white colonists are: Coharie Tribe, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, Meherrin Indian Nation, Sappony Nation, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, and Waccamaw Siouan Tribe.
After the land was colonized and used for farming on the backs of African slaves, a novel church for free Blacks was established after the American Civil War: Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church:
During Rev. Dunston’s pastorate many members were encouraged to purchase farms and the community organized a co-op store for area residences. We are reminded of the legacy of Rev. Dunston in the community and a Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church as he is the only person buried on the church lawn.
One of those members was the Mayo family, which purchased the land – and about 20 years ago sold that part which was used for the development of my neighborhood. Make sure you listen to the music that plays when you visit the church website!
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Thanks for that well-researched and reflective post.
Sanskrit dictionaries tell us that kapota, which is a very common word, can be used for a bird in general, so I’m guessing that’s what’s happening here.
That’s interesting, the myna has even more prominently colored feet than the dove, and could well have been used as the model for an idiom for adorned ladies. Even the matching of the color of the feet and the eyes and beak could echo makeup styles. In Sanskrit we have the word citrapada “brightfoot” as a word for myna.
We really have a paucity of details here.
In the Pali tradition, it seems we basically have just this one reference, which is adopted by a few later passages. The kakuṭa is only ever invoked in this description. By itself we could say little, were it not for the commentary, which says:
Kakuṭapādānīti rattavaṇṇatāya pārāvatasadisapādāni
“kakuṭa feet” means: with red-colored feet like those of a pigeon.
Here “pigeon” is pārāvata, “one come from afar”, which is a well-attested word in both Pali and Sanskrit. We do find pārāvatapadī but only as the name of a plant.
Now, the Kannada reference to kakūṭa for myna is interesting, but it’s an isolated reference in an unrelated language 2500 years later. Try as I might, I can’t find any support for this, so unless we can find something I’ll stick with the Pali tradition here.
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In reference to the story about Nanda, I looked at some equivalents in Chinese, but did not see anything very specific about being dove-footed. One source, the Ekottarika Agama (T 125), refers to female devas (天女). Another, the Abhiniskramana Sutra (T 190), characterizes them more specifically as palace ladies (婇女).
Going back to those verses about rouged feet being beautiful in ancient Indian culture, is this just the same as the red dye that Indian women may still put on their hands and feet sometimes? If so, that may be a very simple explanation.
It looks like men were also sometimes depicted with this red dye on their hands and feet, at least in some of these Pala period manuscript paintings.
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No, the sutta doesn’t specify which particular feature of a kakuṭa’s feet the nymphs’ feet resembled. The commentary suggests that the resemblance is in color, which seems plausible, though it’s not the only possibility. When poets praise a woman’s beauty, they might compare her feet to a dove’s for various reasons, such as lightness of tread, as seen in Swinburne’s Proserpine, or nimbleness of movement, as in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. However, it’s unlikely that the comparison refers to the anisodactylic structure of a dove’s foot. For a woman or a celestial nymph, having three toes pointing forward and one projecting backward (presumably out of her heels?) probably wouldn’t be a great selling point, except perhaps to a very specialized kind of foot fetishist.
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alattakakatā (Sanskrit: āraktaka-kṛtāḥ or alaktaka-kṛtāḥ, where rakta means ‘blood-red’) as a description of pādā (feet) means “feet decoratively coloured red with a certain pigment substance”.
The reference to kakuṭapādāni might actually mean the same thing i.e. feet decorated red (like the red feet of doves) rather than shaped like the feet of doves. If Pāli kakuṭa doesnt refer to Sanskrit kapota (dove) it may perhaps be a cognate of Sanskrit kaukkuṭa (derived from the word kukkuṭa “red-crested rooster”) i.e. a reference to its redness.
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Perhaps, after all, we should translate “red-footed” instead of “dove-footed”. It simply makes more sense to a modern reader and expresses what was understood by the idiom at the time.
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That’s the classic Henna paint, I think. Perhaps “Rouged Feet” would be unclear - “feet painted with henna” or “hennaed feet” (apparently it’s an english word!) would convey the sense better.
But that’s missing the brahmanic link Bhante explains:
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Henna is different, and its use in India is not as old. It tends to be used for ornate patterns, and it appears more orange / gray. It was introduced into India from the Islamic world.
Alta is a red dye, and is often used for the feet and palms in a broader way, rather than for ornate patterns. It has been used at least since the time of the Upanishads.
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Wow! That is really interesting.
Let’s go all in, then, with our dove-footed nymphs! I’m still including my beloved pigeons as part of that group.
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