Wheel of Life (Primary Title)
thanka (Primary Title)
Unknown (Artist)
This diagram summarizes the Buddha’s enlightening vision under the bodhi tree. Gripped by the red demon Mara, a wheel is driven by three animals—representing the poisons of attraction, aversion, and confusion—at its hub. Around that axle, a circuit of people moves upward to purified states and again downward to debased conditions. Their actions—polluted by the poisons—propel their perpetual cycle of birth and rebirth into six realms depicted like slices of a pie. The wheel’s outer rim is the chain of causality that binds them to the phenomenal world.
The system is a closed circle; there is no clear way out. But the Buddha, through comprehending its structure and dynamics indeed discerned an escape route. That pathway, the Buddhist Dharma, can be learned and followed by others. Thus, the Buddha appears both outside the wheel, at the upper right, and within it, near the ten o’clock mark, teaching the Dharma to a group of monks.
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