Endless knot
A knot of interlaced lines with no beginning or end, one of the eight auspicious symbols. Tibetan teachers read it as the union of wisdom and compassion.
Meaning
The Tibetan Language Institute's guide reads the knot as reality itself, where everything is interrelated and exists only as part of a web of karma and its effects. Having no beginning or end, it is also the Buddha's infinite wisdom, the union of compassion and wisdom, and long life. Lama Zopa Rinpoche's translation of his teacher Trijang Dorje Chang's explanation describes the joining on the path of method and wisdom, and of emptiness and dependent arising; at buddhahood, omniscience and compassion are one.
Origin and history
Older English accounts call it a diagram rather than a knot. L. Austine Waddell, writing in 1895, listed it among the eight glorious emblems as the "lucky diagram". Alice Getty's book of 1914 calls it the mystic diagram, srivatsa in Sanskrit, "the thread which guides to happiness", and describes it, with the other seven, as an object of wood or gilded metal set on the altar of Tibetan and Mongolian temples.
A name that doesn't translate
In Lama Zopa Rinpoche's translation the knot keeps its Tibetan name, the glorious peu, left untranslated because, as a note explains, it is not clear how it should be translated. Its Sanskrit name is srivatsa. "Endless knot", the usual English name, is not what the words literally say.
Read next
- Next in Buddhist symbolsVictory bannerA cylindrical banner on a pole, one of the eight auspicious symbols. It stands for the victory of the Buddha's teaching over ignorance, death and every obstacle.
- The same shape in Greek gods and their symbolsZeusZeus’s symbol is the thunderbolt, the weapon Hesiod says the Cyclopes gave him. In Greek art he also holds a sceptre, often with an eagle, his bird, perched on it; the oak was his tree.
See also
Celtic knot, Chinese knot, Dharmachakra, Ensō, Bodhi leaf, Triratna.
Sources
- The Eight Auspicious Symbols, Tibetan Language Institute, quoting Robert Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, Endless Knot
- The Eight Auspicious Signs, Lama Zopa Rinpoche (translator), Mandala, Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, no. 6 and note 1
- Eight Auspicious Symbols (gallery text, illustration after Terese Tse Bartholomew, Hidden Meanings), Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
- The Eight Auspicious Symbols, Tibetan Monks’ Residency, Office of Cultural Affairs, Salisbury University
- The Gods of Northern Buddhism, Alice Getty, with an introduction by J. Deniker, 1914, Clarendon Press, Oxford (Internet Archive)
- The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism, L. Austine Waddell, 1895, W. H. Allen, London (Internet Archive, Cornell University Library copy)
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from diamonds or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 24, 2026. How we research
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