Symbols of Reverence — Ritual & Devotion : Artwork 12

The lotus holds a unique position in the symbolic vocabulary of the Indian subcontinent: it is claimed simultaneously and without contradiction by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, each of which finds in the same flower a different expression of the same essential truth. In Hindu yantra cosmology, the shodasha dala padma — the sixteen-petalled lotus — is specifically associated with the vishuddha chakra, the throat centre, which governs the relationship between inner reality and expressed speech: the space where what is known becomes what is said. This is the lotus of creative intelligence and articulation, of the teacher and the artist, as distinct from the muladhara lotus of groundedness or the anahata lotus of the heart. In Buddhist iconography the lotus is the model of consciousness that has emerged from the mud of conditioned existence without being stained by it. The same flower, the same geometry, two complete cosmologies.