Wheel Of The Law

In the Buddha's teaching, the image of the turning spoked wheel, which in the earlier period had been symbolic of the world's glory, thus became a sign, on one hand, of the wheeling round of sorrow, and, on the other, release in the sunlike doctrine of illumination.

Campbell argues that the Great Reversal transformed the wheel-symbol from cosmic triumphalism into the dual sign of samsaric bondage and soteriological liberation in Buddhist teaching.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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in a later episode of importance, that of the first turning of the Wheel of the Law in the Deer Park of Benares, Asvaghoṣa added to the usual sermon… a second message, delivered not to anyone on earth but to Maitreya, the Future Buddha.

Campbell shows how Asvaghoṣa's redaction of the First Turning reframes the Wheel of the Law as a cosmological event addressed to trans-historical Bodhisattvas, not merely to the five ascetics.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis

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In India the wheel is a symbol of power and victory, a guide to power and the Way… It is the wheel of redemption, moving the right way along the right line… the wheel symbolizes the self-moving power of the unconscious; that is, the Self.

Von Franz interprets the Indian wheel — encompassing the Wheel of the Law — as a psychological symbol of the Self, whose redemptive or tormenting aspect depends on whether consciousness aligns with its movement.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis

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myriads of gods had flocked together to celebrate… the solemn occasion of the Buddha's preaching of a sermon, they were all saying joyfully: 'Forsooth, this is the second time that the wheel of the true law has been set in motion on Indian soil.'

Zimmer documents the Mahayana understanding of successive turnings of the Wheel of the Law as cosmic revelatory events, each marking a new level of doctrinal disclosure.

Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, 1951thesis

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the six realms are represented as a wheel, whose six segments depict the six main types of unenlightened existence… conditioned by the illusion of separate selfhood… These three basic motives or root-causes of unenlightened existence form the nave of the wheel of rebirths.

Govinda provides the Tibetan iconographic structure of the wheel of samsara, grounding the bhavacakra within the law of conditioned existence that the Wheel of the Law addresses and transcends.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis

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demons shouldering heavy clubs guard the Sun Wheel of the Law. Everywhere flowering vines and lianas pour from the mouths and navels of mythological monsters.

Campbell traces the visual iconography of the Wheel of the Law in Early Classic Buddhist sculpture, where it is guarded by demonic figures within a cosmologically abundant world-image.

Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962supporting

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like the Buddhist 'wheel of being,' this also has six spokes… The felly is bound by the linked chain of the twelve causes of rebirth: ignorance, action, consciousness, name-and-form, the sense organs, contact, sensation, desire, intercourse, birth, life, and finally disease, old age, and death.

Campbell identifies structural homology between the Celtic six-spoked wheel and the Buddhist bhavacakra, detailing the twelve nidanas that constitute the law governing the wheel's revolution.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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the notion of Vengeance is secondary, not primitive; the wheel to the early Greek would carry no such suggestion… hers is the regular course of the heavenly bodies symbolized by the rotation of the wheel.

Harrison argues that the Greek wheel of Dike originally expressed impartial cosmic order — an analogue to dharma — rather than retributive fate, locating a pre-punitive stratum of 'wheel of the law' symbolism.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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ROTA TARO ORAT TORA ATOR = The wheel of the tarot announces the law of initiation.

Banzhaf cites Paul Foster Case's anagrammatic formula to identify the Tarot wheel with the announcement of initiatory law, establishing an occult convergence between wheel, rota, and tora (law).

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000supporting

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on a whirling platform, he saw a man with blood dripping down his body; for a wheel was whirling on his head… The moment the Brahmin said this, the wheel left the other's head and settled on his own.

Campbell presents a Pali Jataka narrative in which a punitive wheel-on-the-head transfers between victims, illustrating the karmic-legal dimension of the wheel as an instrument of samsaric retribution.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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The ever-turning Wheel of Life came to signify the laws of karma, leading you to reincarnate in one body after another… karma is in a way simply another explanation for the mystery of fate.

Pollack equates the Wheel of Life with the law of karma, reading it as both a cosmological mechanism and a psychological explanation for the mystery of individual fate.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting

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The Eastern culture, he says, is near the Wheel's center; it is a world of archetypal principles slow to change… The introverted Easterner is concerned with general principles, eternals, unity, stability, and pure being.

Nichols uses the Wheel's geometry to map the contrast between Eastern orientation toward law and unchanging principle versus Western centrifugal engagement with differentiated experience.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside

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The Wheel of Fortune dramatizes the cyclic interaction of all opposites, to be followed by Strength, in which a lady and her lion intermingle their two kinds of energy in harmonious symbiosis.

Nichols positions the Wheel of Fortune as the Tarot's central symbol of cyclic law — the interplay of all opposites — functioning as a pivot between the ego-building and the individuation phases of the Major Arcana.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside

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