geometric · from c. 250 BCE
The Dharmachakra
An eight-spoked wheel for an eightfold path — the emblem Buddhism used for its founder for four centuries before it would depict him at all.
What the sources claim for it
Teaching set in motion, and the eight-part path it sets out.
History
Where does the Dharmachakra come from?
The earliest Buddhist art does not show the Buddha. It shows an empty seat, a pair of footprints, a tree, or a wheel, and the wheel stands for the first sermon at Sarnath, where the teaching is described as being set in motion. Its eight spokes are the eightfold path; Ashoka's pillars put it on the top of columns across the subcontinent in the third century BCE.
That aniconic period matters for how this corpus reads symbols generally. For several hundred years the tradition's central figure was represented exclusively by objects and absences, which is the strongest possible demonstration that a symbol can carry a person without depicting one.
1 figure
Who is it attached to?
Figures it is used against
The mark is aimed at them. A ward names its target, which makes these the sharpest attributions on the page.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
On the flag of India since 1947 as the Ashoka Chakra, and standard on Buddhist buildings and publications worldwide; also the origin of the phrase 'turning the wheel'.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
The Pali Canon
Anonymous; attributed to the Buddha and his disciples · c. 100 BCE, from oral tradition · Pali
The first sermon, described as the setting in motion of the wheel of dhamma.
Read The Pali Canon in full ↗Cover: CC0 · Faredoka · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Swastika
An auspicious mark used continuously for four and a half thousand years across most of the world, and destroyed as a public sign in the West by twelve years of one European party's use of it.
Om
A syllable before it was ever a shape — recited at the opening and close of Vedic utterance, and only much later written as the mark everyone recognises.
The Vajra
Indra's thunderbolt, forged from a sage's bones, and later the ritual sceptre of Tibetan Buddhism — a weapon that changed sides.
The Wheel of Becoming
Six realms in one circle, held in the jaws of the lord of death — a cosmological diagram painted at monastery entrances so that everyone entering has read it.
The Triple Spiral
Three joined spirals cut into a kerbstone at Newgrange five thousand years ago — older than the pyramids, and completely unexplained.
The Pentagram
A five-pointed star drawn in one unbroken line — an accounting mark, a Pythagorean password, a Christian emblem of the five wounds, and only recently a sign of evil.