Philip Ellis Wheelwright
on
THE WHEEL
Ljubljana Marshes. Wheel with axle (oldest wooden wheel yet discovered dating to Copper Age (c. 3,130 BC). [1]
Perhaps the most philosophically mature of the great archetypal symbols is the Circle, together with its most frequent imagistic concretion the Wheel. From earliest recorded times the circle has been widely recognized as the most perfect of figures, both because of its simple formal perfection and for the reason stated in Heraclitus' aphorism, "In the circle the beginning and the end are the same.”[Note 4] When the circle is concretized as a wheel, two additional properties come in: the wheel has spokes, and it rotates. The spokes of the wheel are taken as iconically symbolic of the sun’s rays; both the spokes and the rays being symbolic of the creative influences going out to all things in the universe from a central life-giving source. In its rotation a wheel has the property that when its axis is at rest the movement of its spokes and rim is perfectly regular—a property which readily becomes symbolic of the human truth that to find the quiet centre of one's own soul is to produce a more tranquil ordering of one's experiences and activities.
Like many another archetypal symbol the Wheel is potentially ambivalent. It may have either a positive or a negative significance, and occasionally both. Negatively the Wheel can symbolize in the West the hazardous play of fortune, and in the East the persistent cycle of deaths and rebirths from which release is sought. Yoga, to the Hindu, is the patient disciplined exercise of action and non-action whereby an individual may prepare himself for such release. On the positive side, in addition to the symbolic import mentioned in the foregoing paragraph, the Wheel is in Hindu tradition connected with Dharma, or divine law. Buddhist iconography makes much of " the Wheel of the Law," and there is a widespread legend that Buddha, when he gave his first sermon after his initiatory vision under the bo tree ( the so-called Deer Park Sermon), set it revolving. In traditional Chinese Buddhist ritual a chariot wheel is often fastened to a post and turned to the right, which is supposed to reflect the sun in its orbit and to symbolize the path of universal Tao. In Tibet the idea of the perfection and sincerity of universal law can be symbolized by so simple a gesture as joining the thumb with the middle finger. The Tibetan prayer wheel had originally the same meaning, and perhaps still retains it for informed worshipers, despite the crude magical uses to which it has later been put. [Note 5]
A special development of the Wheel symbolism is found in the Buddhist tendency to let the purity of the still centre be symbolized by the lotus flower. Reciprocally the wheel is often pictured as having a lotus at its axis and the lotus is often displayed with outgoing rays of light. The actual lotus flower has two characteristics that have especially struck the Oriental imagination—its simple pure beauty and its mysterious birth by water. A Buddhist teaching says t h a t as the lotus flower arises from the dark depths of the lake to reveal itself in beauty, and as the sun arises in darkness and sends forth his rays, so Buddha issues forth from " the dark womb of being " in order to chase away the darkness of illusion (maya) by revealing the truth. In India the wheel is sometimes laid on the top of a pillar, as an icon of the lotus in full bloom on its stem. In the widely revered Lotus Scripture of Mahayana Buddhism the principal teaching is at once the eternity of divine law and the multiplicity of ways of expressing and teaching it — the still centre and the many spokes or rays of the divine sun-wheel. [Note 6]
4. Heraclitus, Fragment 70 in Bywater (followed by most English translators), 103 in Diels, and 109 in the present writer's Heraclitus (Princeton University Press, 1959), where it is translated, "In the circle the beginning and the end are common/' This is literal. But the word [. . .] besides meaning "common," carries an overtone of [. . .] "with rational intelligence." On Heraclitus' functional use of the pun, see the Princeton University Press volume, p. 120, note 8, and again p. 148, note to Fragment 81.
5. W. E. Soothill, The Three Religions of China (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1923), regards the Lamaist prayer wheel as "a grotesque form of Buddha's lofty conception of the Wheel of the Law rolling forward like the sun and enlightening the world." Charles A. S. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism (Peiping, 1931): "The turning of the wheel of the Law was probably connected with the Vedic sun-worshiping ceremonies in which a chariot wheel was fastened to a post and turned towards the right, i.e. following the path of the Universal Law which directed the sun in its orbit." Cf. E. Dale Saunders, Mudra (Bollingen Series XLVIII: Pantheon Books, 1958).
6. Sir Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism (London, 1921), esp. Vol. II, p. 52, and Vol. Ill, p. 438; Sir Hari Singh Gour, The Spirit of Buddhism (London, 1929), p. 166; H. Hackmann, Buddhism as a Religion (London, 1910), p. 194; Eugene W. Burlingame, Buddhist Parables (Yale University Press, 1922); Charles A. S. Williams, Encyclopaedia of Chinese Symbols and Art Motives (New York, Julian Press, i960), under the entries "Lotus" and "Wheel of the Law."
What is briefly called the Lotus Scripture in the text is the Saddharmapundarika, traditionally translated "Lotus of the Good Name."
From: Philip Ellis Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, Indiana University Press, 1962, pp. 125 -127.
[1] Around 2000 BC, the Ljubljana Marshes in the immediate vicinity of Ljubljana were settled by people living in pile dwellings. Prehistoric pile dwellings and the oldest wooden wheel in the world.
