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The Wheel of Life
On the outer edge or rim of the wheel are twelve images. They symbolically refer to the factors that interact to determine the consequences of activity or karma. They derive from and can be related to, the Madhyamika view concerning the nature of reality. Here, too, there may be some variation depending upon the tradition or school to which the tangka artist belongs.
At top is a blind man with his stick representing spiritual blindness; this is the state of ignorance in which we can easily lose our way. Sometimes we do not even know there is a way.
At 2 o'clock is a potter at work on his own products. These are the deeds and actions we perform ~ the formations, preparations or samskaras. We are responsible for our own pots, not fate.
At the 3 o'clock position is a monkey playing in a tree. It depicts ordinary attention or consciousness which shifts continuously in the undisciplined mind. Meditation seeks to calm the monkey in order to gain access to the nature of consciousness.
At 4 is a boat with two people in it, Name and Form. [Some versions have a person and the heaps or skandhas] These act together as the conditioned way in which we experience the world. The boat is the mind moving about on 'reality'. (Some have interpreted this image as the physical and the intellectual or spiritual moving the boat of experience.)
At 5 is a house with six openings: five shuttered windows and a closed door. These are the five senses plus a sixth which is the faculty of apperception by which we interpret the input of the senses. That is, the sixth sense is apperception, recognition at the sub-conscious level.
Moving to the 6 o'clock position: A man and a woman embracing demonstrates contact, the consequence of sensual perceptions.
At 7 is a person who has been struck in the eye by an arrow. He is wounded by emotion, the subsequent feelings that can have a "fatal" effect. They create suffering.
At 8 is a woman offering a drink to a man. It illustrates desire that has been stimulated by perceptions and emotions which leads us to drink more from the world of appearances.
At the 9th position is a person picking the fruit of his tree. He receives the consequence he expects will be sweet.
At 10 is a maiden about to cross the stream. In one version of the Wheel, there is one person beckoning another to go or to come back.
At 11 is a woman giving birth. The new life is determined by the fruits of the old and is attracted to the parents accordingly, in order to be born.
Finally [?], the illustration that ends one round but begins another new life in one of the realms, is that of two people carrying a burden on a litter. This is the body, a corpse wrapped up on its way to be disposed of. Other people suffer as they bear the burden of another's death.
"If any link in the twelve-linked circle of causation (pratitya-samutpada) is broken the entire circle ceases to be operative because the root of it, the zero [Sanskrit shunya] is discovered. This origination is rooted in zero, proceeds from it, ends in it, and itself is nothing but an extension of zero." This zero is not infinite [like conceptions of God] but neither is it finite.
Whether we are meditating, dreaming, or going about our other activities ultimately we are responsible for our own experience. According to the Buddhist view, objects and beings make their appearance without an external stimulus, or any First Cause. It is said that, just as a painter can paint a portrait of a demon and then be terrified by it, so unenlightened beings paint a picture of the six realms of samsara and then are tormented and terrified by that picture. Through the power of our own minds, we create the six realms of existence and then rotate through them. We are the ones who create the realms and the endless cycle known as samsara.
