Chakra design as a sanctifying boundary
The lotus wheel design was further developed in the Amaravati stupa, Andhra Pradesh, by the Satavahana dynasty. I was able to see the artefacts in the state museums at Amaravati and Chennai. There, huge Lotus Wheels were carved all over the place, creating a striking impression of the holiness of the Buddha, together with the Dharma Chakra.
The Satavahana dynasty, which then ruled over a vast territory stretching from present-day Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, can be said to have played an essential role in handing over Buddhism and chakra symbolism propagated by King Ashoka at first, from northern India to southern India.
Later, South India, centring the Tamil region, would break out as a significant player in this chakra ideology.
I call the wheel (chakra), the sun wheel (Surya chakra) and this lotus wheel (Padma chakra) “the trinity of Indian Chakra symbolism”. As the name suggests, these three overlapped with each other to create the magnificent majesty of the Indian religious art world afterwards.
It could be said that the design functioned as a meditation object too. The design, which originally radiated out from the centre, represented the providence that everything in the world unfolded from the very source, the Supreme God (primordially the sun).
When we meditate, it follows the radial design in reverse, concentrating our mind, which is diffused in everyday life, towards the centre, God. The chakra design was a form that symbolised both two contexts, the grace of God radiating from the very centre and the mind of the devoted meditator concentrating in search of God, the world centre.
Let’s consider the ‘halo’ of Buddhist statues, which is familiar to us Japanese. The design in which light radiates from the centre behind the statue, known as the halo, is a typical motif of the fusion of the sacred wheel and the Surya chakra.
In Tamil bronze statues of deities from around the 10th century, the halo is often in the form of a wheel. In Japan, statues such as the Bishamonten statue at Horyu-ji Temple also bear a wheel. The gods and Buddha literally carry the prestige of the sacred wheel on their backs and are thereby ‘sanctified’.
Paintings and stone statues from the Gupta dynasty onwards have a floral pattern on the halo in many cases, forming a lotus wheel design. This would be a fusion of the sacred wheel, the sun and the lotus flower too.
In later Jainism, this halo lotus wheel shows a highly refined form of development.
This golden halo is also widespread in Hinduism, suggesting that the halo is essentially the luminosity of the sun=Surya.
The fact that the face of the deity is placed in the very centre of these circular haloes is a metaphor that the deity is the central principle of this world.
In association with this halo, the design of a giant lotus wheel is often depicted on temple ceilings in India, regardless of religious denomination.
I believe that this is a sacred sign formed by the overlap of the wheel or lotus wheel with the chhatra (holy umbrella) that is placed over the heads of noble people and gods and Buddha. If you look closely, the chhatra is likewise nothing more than the chakra design itself, radiating out from the centre.
It would also be possible to think that the halo was originally designed as carrying this Chhatra on the back in the first place.
For the chhatra like above, If its handle shaft is extended and another umbrella is attached to the other side, it might “roll along as a wheel” as it were.
Of course, the culture of these ceiling lotus wheels was introduced to Japan too, via China continent.
As a counterpart to the lotus wheel on the ceiling, we must not forget the pedestal on which the deities and Buddhas sit, called the lotus seat. This is no doubt a realistic three-dimensional version of the sacred lotus flower wheel.
The design of the lotus wheel has a strong connotation as a boundary to purify and consecrate the place, as seen in the circle balustrade surrounding the second stupa at Sanchi.
The lotus wheel as a pedestal and chhatra (holy umbrella) may have been used to sanctify space from below and above and to invite in the spirits of gods and Buddhas from the heavenly realm.
I have travelled throughout India visited many temples and identified many examples of this. The design of the lotus wheels (Padma Chakra) was applied to the steps of the temple gate, the underside of the beams, pillars on both sides, the floor and ceiling of the sanctum, the front of the shrine chamber, the entrance frame, and above the heads and under feet of the deity statues, to every part of the colonnade, and any other boundaries of the sanctified areas in the temple.
Such lotus-wheel boundaries were universally shared by all Indian religions, not only Buddhism and Hinduism, but also Jainism and Sikhism.
This trinity of the chakra symbolism shows up the lotus wheel to the forefront and flourishes literally as a gorgeous and auspicious floral pattern in the pure Dravidian world of Tamil.
Yoga Chakras which sanctificate the whole body
The lotus wheel symbol, which flourished in the Buddhist culture of Sanchi, Bharhut and Amaravati, blossomed into another Chakra ideology hundreds of years later.
As I looked at the images of deities and Buddhas sitting on lotus pedestals with lotus wheel canopies above their heads, I was reminded of something. It is the Yoga Chakra.
The yogic chakras refer to the spiritual centres of the human body that exist along the spinal column, which are, from below, the Muladhara chakra at the perineum, the Swadhishthana chakra at the tailbone, the Manipura chakra at the navel, the Anahata chakra at heart, the Vishuddha chakra at the throat, the Ajina chakra on the forehead, and finally, it leads to the Sahasrara Chakra at the top of the head.
And if you look at the yoga texts, you realise that all the chakras are symbolised in the form of a lotus flower wheel. The word Sahasrara Chakra, the highest, itself means ‘a thousand petals lotus flower’.
In the word ‘Sahasrara’, ‘sahasra’ meaning a “thousand” and ‘ara’ meaning “spokes of a wheel”, originally meant “wheel of a thousand spokes”, but has been turned into “lotus flower of a thousand petals” by the identification of wheel and lotus flower.
I could not contain my excitement when this fact occurred to me. Things I had learned in the past came back to me in a completely new context. It was a whole new perspective that I had never considered before.
My intuition said that this yoga chakra clearly has its main origins in the Indus chakra script, or “vision”. There was a fact that the sitting meditation culture was inherited as a core factor of Indian spiritual culture even after going through the turbulent history of the decline of the Indus civilisation and the invasion of the Aryans.
It was inherited in the ‘forest tradition’ (Aranyaka) of the ancient Upanishadic period and would have been practised by the non-Vedic “Samana (Shramana)” of the Buddha’s time, or those who were called the ‘outsiders’ too. Siddhartha also attained final enlightenment through this ‘meditation on sitting posture (Asana)’ and became a Buddha.
Not only in Buddhism, but also in Jainism, which emerged as a critical force against the same Vedic rituals, and by mainstream Hinduism, sitting meditation continued to be shared as a central practice in India for thousands of years.
Not a few of them might have experienced visions of chakra in the depths of their meditation, and put philosophical interpretations on them. When this was combined with the experience of kundalini, the spiritual energy centres sensed in the body were naturally called “Chakra”.
It may be, for one thing, that the image of the Rigvedic Ratha wheel as Indra’s source of vibrant energy and the vigorous solar energy overlapped with the cosmic energy of the Kundalini Shakti (the power of Goddess) in the body.
When the meditator experienced rising kundalini and the spiritual centre in the body activated, there happened some ‘interpretation’ of ‘it was bloomed’. That’s why the name of the centre is called Chakra=wheel but the visual of it became depicted with a lotus flower.
If the ancient Indians had equated the wheel with the lotus flower, as described as “a lotus flower as great as a wheel” in many Buddhist scriptures, this interpretation would have been quite natural for them.
In the Hatha Yoga classic Shiva Samhita, the chakra is called Padma (lotus flower), and Chapter 5 of the same book details the seven lotus flowers from Adhara Padma to Sahasrara Padma.
Wikipedia
I went further in my contemplation.
To begin with, the most complete form of sitting in Indian meditation practice is called padmasana, or lotus sitting. This is also known as the full lotus position in Zen meditation, in which the knees are open with the feet deeply crossed together, reminiscent of a bloomed lotus flower. And I noticed that this lotus position has the same name as the lotus seat on which the gods and Buddha are seated in Japanese (both are same Renge-za 蓮華座). What does this mean…?
There I remembered the words I was taught when starting to learn yoga in India for the first time.
‘Purify and prepare your body as a holy temple to invite God into it.’
Anyone who has studied traditional yoga has heard this at least once.
I wrote before that the lotus pedestal on which statues of deities and Buddhas are placed creates a spiritual boundary when combined with the overhead Chhatra (holy umbrella) canopy or the lotus wheel on the ceiling. Perhaps the Padma-asana (Lotus posture) of the sitting meditation is a way of ‘constructing the lotus pedestal with one’s own body’, as a sanctifying boundary, isn’t it?
The Sahasrara chakra at the top of the head is represented as a multilayered lotus flower wheel with a thousand petals. This kaleidoscopic image overlaps beautifully with the multi-petalled lotus wheel design seen on the aforementioned temple ceiling. It is sometimes crowned on the temple roof like the Kailasa temple in Ellora for good example.
So to speak, the ceiling or roof (crown) of the temple is the crown of the meditator’s head, and the meditator’s body, who meditates in a lotus posture (Padmasana) and opened the final Sahasrara chakra (thousand-petalled lotus) at the crown of the head, becomes a living and God-bearing sanctified temple!
The process of the lotus flower wheel opening in sequence from the lowest Muladhara chakra to the uppermost Sahasrara chakra is a perfect illustration of the step-by-step purification of the body covered with worldly dust in its usual state, until finally the soul is completely united with the supreme.
Just as an image of God, which is merely a lump of stone or metal, becomes a living God who is truly present when it is enshrined in the ritual installation called the temple, so a Yoga practitioner who has turned his body into a spiritual installation (internal temple) in the depths of meditation, when his whole body was penetrated by the divine energy called kundalini and all the chakra=lotus flowers bloomed, then unites with the Supreme, becomes a living God itself.
This must be the hidden truth of the yoga chakras. At that time, I was certainly visualizing the profound secrets of yoga.
~to be continued~
INDIA~The Land of Holy Chakra 