The Swastika…

Hey all,
    One of my friends cum readers recently mailed me thus -

Hey,
Just like to say a nice article,
My mother was wondering about your swastika picture, according to her it is a symbol of the Nazi Germans from the 1930s n 40s,
could someone please re-assure her as I have tried and failed…
As I know, the swastika is a symbol of peace and harmony accross the world, and isn’t a symbol of hatred and violence, correct?

    Thus, I decided that it was time and time enough to educate the westerners about the symbolic representation of the swastika…

    The Swastika is in fact a sacred symbol which evolved in the Aryan ages. It is a symbol in Hinduism, later adopted by Buddhists and Jains (the founders of both these relegions being former Hindus). It stands, not for violence, but for evolution, peace, and universal goodwill…

    Swastika is a Sanskrit word - svastika, from su “well”, and asti “being”, thus “good fortune” or “well-being”.

    In Hinduism, the two symbols represent the two forms of the creator god Brahma: facing right it represents the evolution of the universe (Pravritti), facing left it represents the involution of the universe (Nivritti). It is also seen as pointing in all four directions (North, East, South and West) and thus signifies stability and groundedness. Its use as a sun symbol can first be seen in its representation of Surya, the Hindu Sun God. The swastika is considered extremely holy and auspicious by all Hindus, and is regularly used to decorate all sorts of items to do with Hindu culture. It is used in all Hindu yantras and religious designs. Throughout the subcontinent of India it can be seen on the sides of temples, written on religious scriptures, on gift items, and on letterhead. The Hindu God Ganesh is often shown as sitting on a lotus flower on a bed of swastikas.

    The swastika is found all over Hindu temples, signs, altars, pictures and iconography where it is sacred. It is used in all Hindu weddings, festivals, ceremonies, houses and doorways, clothing and jewelry, motor transport and even decorations on food items like cakes and pastries.

    The Om symbol is also sacred in Hinduism. While Aum is representative of a single primordial tone of creation, the Swastika is a pure geometrical mark and has no syllabic tone associated with it. The Swastika is one of the 108 symbols of Lord Vishnu and represents the sun’s rays without which there would be no life.

    This symbol evolved in India, and later spread throughout the world, via Greece. The Greeks were traders, and traded with India, and thus Greeks were the second generation to use the Swastika.

    Much much much much later, the symbol spread across Europe, and
Hitler used it for his Nazi regime. Today, very many people believe
that the swastika is evil because Hitler used it. This is not true.

    In his autobiography, Hitler wrote -

“I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final
form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika
in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion
between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as
the shape and thickness of the swastika.”

   

    The use of the swastika was associated by Nazi theorists with their conjecture of Aryan cultural descent of the German people. Following the Nordicist version of the Aryan invasion theory, the Nazis claimed that the early Aryans of India, from whose Vedic tradition the swastika sprang, were the prototypical white invaders. It was also widely believed that the Indian caste system had originated as a means to avoid racial mixing. The concept of Racial purity was an ideology central to Nazism though it is now considered unscientific. For Rosenberg, the Aryans of India were both a model to be imitated and a warning of the dangers of the spiritual and racial “confusion” that, he believed, arose from the close proximity of races.

    Now, there’s another symbol named the Sauwastika.

The name sauwastika is sometimes given for the supposedly “evil”, left-facing, form of the swastika (卍). A common belief is that the left-facing swastika is generally regarded as evil in Hindu tradition. This is because the much more common form in India is the right-facing swastika. Indians of all faiths sometimes use the symbol in both orientations - mostly for symmetry. Buddhists, outside of India, generally use the left-facing swastika over the right-facing swastika although, again, both can be used. Despite this, the misconception that the left-facing swastika is evil is widespread, even among some contemporary Indian communities.

Well, thats all I know about the Swastika… If you want more information, Google for it, or Wiki for it :) Cheers, and I hope that your misconceptions have cleared up! :)

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October 29, 2006 | Filed Under Emotion,Literature,Philosophy, General World 

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One Response to “The Swastika…”

  1. sam on January 28th, 2008

    fuck
    you

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