During my trip to Hong Kong, I had the possibility of visiting the Tian Tan Buddha statue, located on Ngong Ping village in Lantau island. I was extremely surprised by the symbol carved on the chest’s statue. A swastika! This brought me to search a little to become a bit less ignorant. I was a complete layman when looking at the statue. I was just thinking “WTF is wrong here?!”
Well the swastika is indeed an ancient symbol with many different meanings that became corrupted by the bloody chapter of the Nazism period. It can be seen in the art of Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Celts, Native Americans, Persians, Indian, Hindus and Buddhists.
The list is extensive so let’s just focus in some of the crowd.
To Buddhists, the swastika represents the Dharma (“one's righteous duty or any virtuous path in the common sense of the term”), auspiciousness and good fortune as well as the Buddha’s footprints and heart. It can be found oriented to both sides (clockwise – to the right; and counter clockwise – to the left). In the first case, it represents strength and intelligence (ura manji) and, when facing left, it expresses love and mercy (omote manji). In China and Japan, the Buddhist swastika is seen as a symbol of plurality, eternity, abundance, prosperity and long life.
To Hindus the clockwise swastika is a symbol of the sun, the god Vishnu (the supreme God), the evolution of the universe; while the counter clockwise represents magic , Kali Yuga (“last of the four stages that the world goes through as part of the cycle of yugas described in the Indian scriptures”), the involution of the universe.
The Native Americans also used the swastika, with different meanings among the several tribes: the octopus that created the world (for the Kuna people), a ritual of healing (Hopi people)…
Finally when it was adopted by Adolf Hitler’s party the swastika could be understood as “the symbol of the creating, acting life” and as “race emblem of Germanism”. The red colour of the flag represented the social idea of the movement while in white the nationalistic idea. This horrific period of History added wrong interpretations to the ancient swastika and all the mysticism around it, especially in the youth population of the western world where its representation is even prohibited in some countries and always associated with slaughter and death.
“People only see what they are prepared to see”
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