Asian Studies

After a period of economic boom, the United States went bust.  The situation today is similar to the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression of the Thirties, which remind people that business cycles dictate their lives.  America is now also at war again after a temporary peaceful lull.  And just like the Roman or Greek empires which rose and fell, the Unites States is now declining relative to other political powers like China.  Christians sometimes panic and think that the end of the world is near, but Buddhists remain calm since they know that all the ups and downs or cycles of life are normal.  It just needs to be moderated to become less painful.  This is what Buddhist philosophy teaches, and it is aesthetically illustrated on the Bhavacakra or the Wheel of Life.  Truly, there is a plethora of symbolism and allegory contained in the art of Ancient Buddhism. The Wheel of Life, said to have been created by Buddha himself, best represents the Buddhist philosophy.
Briefly, Buddhism is all about the Middle Way, which is the solution to the problem asserted in the Four Noble Truths.  The First truth says that life is dukkhaa word used to describe the experience of riding an old wooden cart or wagon with an uneven wheel, or the feeling that you get when you hear a screeching irregular potters wheel when it turns.  This is a description of the cycles of life and everything in the universe.  Everything is part of an infinite cyclical loop of birth, life, death and rebirth.  War or terror, for example, will always be around, since periods of peace are impermanent. And while everybody is certain to die, memories about them live on, so they continue to be reborn.  Hitler, for example, is still alive through books and other media, so he still causes suffering in some parts of the world.

The Second Noble Truth exposes the cause of dukkha.  Rodney St. Michael, In Sync My World, describes the general second truth dukkha is caused by Yin and Yang, two abstract representations of polar opposites that exist in the universe like the opposite poles of a battery or a bar magnet.  Yang for example is compulsive desire.  On the other hand, Yin is aversion or the avoidance of what is desirable.  In terms of race, Yangs are Whites and Yellows and Yins are Blacks and Browns.  With respect to gender, Yangs are males and gays, whereas Yins are females, bisexuals and lesbians.  And in politics, for example, Yangs are Democrats and Yins are Republicans.  The existence of many more occurrences of Yin and Yang produces infinite cycles of suffering.

The Third Noble Truth then says that to extinguish the suffering of dukkha, one most extinguish Yin and Yang and the last Noble Truth asserts that to extinguish Yin and Yang, one must follow the Middle Way, a path of moderation between the two extremes.  The Middle Way is described as the Noble Eightfold Path.  This path reconfigures your mind and lifestyle so that your thoughts, perspectives, compulsions, obsessions, fears and so forth are controlled, calibrated and centered.  By managing ones life through the Middle Way, the effects of dukkha are minimized.

Many scientists, authors, politicians, actors, athletes and other influential people endorse and practice some form of Buddhism since it is an effective secular way to manage life.  The long list includes famous personalities such as Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Brad Pitt, Tiger Woods, George Lucas and many more (St.Michael, 2003).  Even Pope John Paul II, who invited The 14th Dalai Lama on several occasions to lead world ecumenical conferences, believes in Buddhism (Knickmeyer, 1999).  Many psychologists, psychiatrists and neuro-scientists, such as Carl Jung, also endorse it since it is a scientific philosophy.  President George W. Bush also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama (BBC News, 2007).

Buddha himself is said to have influenced political leaders during his time, and supposedly, he used the Wheel of Life illustration to get his point across.  The Divyavadana, an anthology of Buddhist stories mentions that Buddha gave a copy of the art piece to King Rudrayana.  The artistic diagram depicts a wheel showing the circular traction section, the hub and several spokes that divide the wheel into either five or six sections, depending on the version.  The sections depict various metaphors that relate to different situations that cause the wheel of cyclic suffering to turn in a cause-and-effect pattern.  The causal links are more specifically portrayed as twelve scenes that cause human suffering, from ignorance to death, a cycle that repeats perpetually.  At the hub are three busy animals, a cock, a boar and a serpent, symbolizing greed, ignorance or delusion, and hatred, respectively.  Like a guinea pig running perpetually on a spinning wheel, these three are the roots of evil that cause the chain of suffering to continue until one decides to be freed from it by following the Middle Way.  Lastly, a monstrous beast with a crown of five skulls and three eyes, representing death and time, holds the Wheel with its paws and feet.  Collectively, these tell the story of the Four Noble Truths.

In the five or six sections divided by the spokes, six different worlds are painted as metaphors for various conditions and personalities that cause unhappiness in life. In the first world, the Buddha can be seen with a lute, together with devas, or metaphorically rich and powerful people who think that they are immortal.  But the Buddha reminds them that everything in life is impermanent.  Pleasures do not last, and their erroneous delusions make them suffer just like people in Western First World countries like the United States.  In the second world, asuras or symbolic revolutionaries or rebels, are portrayed, fighting devas.  Here the Buddha is shown with a flaming sword, telling the asuras that communist-socialist states or what was called the Second World, such as the former Soviet Union, is also a world of suffering.  They keep fighting devas and pay the price for it.  In the third world, the Buddha is painted as a monk with a begging bowl and helps average humans who experience the troubles of birth, sickness and aging.  The fourth world depicts the animal kingdom.  Buddha loves animals and considers them to be sentient beings like humans, but humans butcher them for meat, and use them for farming, transportation and entertainment.  They suffer too like humans, but Buddha comforts them by reading a story from a book, as painted on the section.  Then, the fifth world depicts pretas or ghosts of the past, metaphors for bad memories like Hitler that still linger in peoples minds.  People have a hard time letting go and build houses for these ghosts, like Holocaust museums in Europe.  As a result, people suffer.  Finally, the last world is cold and hot hell, or the hellish existence of people because of the extremes of Yin and Yang.  The Buddha here bears a flame, like bodhisatvas or illuminati, giving hope to people in the darkest corners of the world, telling them that, like everything else, their hellish suffering, whether because of poverty, war, disease, broken relationships or anything else, is impermanent.  Eventually, it will end, as the Wheel of Life keeps turning.

Furthermore, the traction section or the Wheel of Lifes outer rim portrays the 12 interdependent causes, linked in various ways, of dissatisfaction or suffering in life, reminding people of the things that they need to be mindful of to live better.  These include ignorance (painted as a blind old man), mental formations or conditioning (like a potter that shapes his own destiny), untamed thinking (similar to a monkey that jumps from tree to tree or one thought to another), name and form or Yang and Yin (like two inseparable people on the same boat), the five senses and the mind (similar to five windows and a door to a house), contact (a man then embraces a woman after the previous situations occur), sensation or feelings (cupid fires an arrow at his eye and hes emotionally stuck), craving or compulsive desire (a woman offers a man some water, just as she satisfies his thirst), clinging or grasping (as a man plucks tree fruits and does not want to lose his loved one), devotion and continuity (the woman marries the man), birth (a woman gives birth after they mate), and aging which leads to death (a corpse in the fetal position shows how the cycle will start again and live in one or more of the six worlds).

In the end, just as Sigmund Freud observed that all human motivations and actions stem from sex, whether physical or simply relational or emotional, Buddha noticed that world suffering is cyclical, caused by desires, and can be managed through the Middle Way, which is what the art of the Wheel of Life tells.  The philosophy has truly influenced the aesthetic values of Buddhism and the Wheel of Life.  Buddhists would indeed have a hard time explaining their beliefs without it.