Religious symbols

About religious symbols

These pages cover the symbols of six living religions: Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam and Taoism. Each entry starts with what a symbol means to the people who use it today, then turns to where it came from. Where communities read a symbol differently, or where a reading is recent, the entry says so and names who holds each view. Legends are told as legends, credited to the tradition that tells them. Taoist symbols begins with the yin yang, the circle of a dark and a light half that pictures yin and yang, which in Daoist teaching, as Fabrizio Pregadio describes it, are the two complementary forces that generate things by joining and regulate the cosmos by alternating.

Symbols shared between traditions

Some symbols belong to more than one faith. The open hand is the hamsa to Jews and the khamsa, or hand of Fatima, to Muslims. The British Museum notes that its hand amulets from the Middle East and North Africa may have been used by Muslims or Jews, and My Jewish Learning calls the hamsa today a Jewish and Israeli symbol.

In Hindu images Vishnu holds a lotus and a conch. Both are also among the eight auspicious symbols of the Buddhism of East Asia and the Himalayan region, with the wheel, the parasol, the victory banner, the vase, the two fish and the endless knot. Each tradition's page gives the symbol its own meaning.

Wheels and stars

Some shapes appear in more than one tradition with a different meaning in each. In the hands of Vishnu or Durga a wheel is a weapon: T. A. Gopinatha Rao describes Vishnu's discus, the chakra, as sculpted in one form like the wheel of a cart, with spokes and nave, grasped by the rim. In early Buddhist sculpture from India a wheel, usually with two gazelles, stands for the Buddha's teaching: Alfred Foucher explains it by the teaching in the Gazelle-park at Benares, described as putting the wheel of the law in motion.

Interlaced triangles can mislead too. The Star of David is two equilateral triangles with the same centre, pointing in opposite directions. The Sri Yantra has four triangles pointing up and five pointing down, which, Subhash Kak writes, make 43 triangles. The eight-pointed Rub el Hizb marks reading divisions in most copies of the Qur'an.