This mudra is one of the most widely used symbolic and ritual gestures across Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism. Across Southeast Asia, depictions of deities, saints, great teachers, or gurus, show them in the benevolent abhaya mudra, making it a recognisable gesture and an indicator of divine associations.

It appears most significantly within Buddhist art, in murals, sculpture, thangkas and popular prints, lending particular symbolic meaning to its context. When it is made with the left hand, as is common in Theravada Buddhism, it is thought to denote a warning or a command to halt. This interpretation is based on a popular Buddhist story in which the Buddha stopped the advances of a rampaging elephant released by a spiteful Devdutta — his nephew and disciple, by extending his hand in the abhaya mudra. In another incident, the Buddha uses the mudra to resolve a water dispute within a family.

There have been minor inflections in how mudra is represented across different periods. In Gandharan art, for instance, the hand forming the gesture is held up at the shoulder level, but in later periods, from the fifth century CE onwards, the hand begins to dip until it is at hip level. Though primarily seen in representations of the standing Amoghasiddhi, it is also associated with the walking Buddha in the Theravada sects of Thailand and Laos.