The swastika, in two parts

The teaching

As the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain lore of the sign teaches it.

The name and the shape

The swastika is a cross whose four arms are bent at right angles, all the same way. Its name is Sanskrit: svasti, well-being, from su, good, and asti, it is; the swastika is the mark of it is well, the sign that brings well-being. In Hindu use the arms most often turn to the right, clockwise, and the form turned the other way is sometimes called the sauvastika. Greek ornament knew it as the gammadion, four gammas joined at the foot, and English heraldry as the fylfot.

In Hindu homes and temples

In Hindu use the swastika is a blessing on beginnings. It is drawn at the threshold and on the door, on the first page of a new account book at Diwali, on wedding invitations and on the ground in coloured powder, and it is marked at the start of rites, often with Ganesha, the lord of beginnings who removes obstacles. Turning to the right, it follows the course of the sun across the sky of India, rising in the east, passing south at noon and setting in the west, and so it stands for the sun, for prosperity and for good fortune.

The left-turning form is used less. It is tied to the night, and in tantric traditions to the goddess Kali. Teachers read the four arms in many ways: as the four directions, the four Vedas, the four aims of life and the four stages of life.

In Jain teaching

For Jains the swastika is the sign of Suparshvanatha, the seventh of the twenty-four ford-makers, and every Jain temple and holy book carries it; rites often begin and end with it, drawn in grains of rice around the altar. Its four arms are the four states in which a soul can be born as it turns in the round of rebirth by its karma: heavenly beings, human beings, beings of hell, and animals and plants.

Above it in the Jain emblem stand three dots, the three jewels of right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, which make the straight path out of that round; and above them a crescent with a dot, the siddhashila, the place beyond the three worlds where freed souls dwell for ever. Read upward, the emblem is the whole teaching: the round of births, the path, and release.

In Buddhist use

In Buddhism the swastika marks the Buddha's footprints, and it is set on the chest, the palms and the soles of his images, where it is read as the seal of his heart and as the turning of his teaching. In China it became a written character, wan, ten thousand, meaning all things and boundless good fortune, and in Japan, as the manji, it marks Buddhist temples on maps and appears in the crests of old families. In Tibet the Bon religion keeps the left-turning form, the yungdrung, the sign of what is everlasting.

The badge of 1920, and the claim it carried

The second part of the sign's history is a theft. In 1920 the Nazi party of Germany made a black swastika in a white disc on red its badge, and its leader explained the colours: red for the party's social idea, white for its nationalism, and the hooked cross for the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, a struggle he declared to be against the Jews. Under that badge the Nazi state murdered six million Jews and millions of others.

The claim behind the badge was that a white Aryan race of masters had made all civilisation, with the swastika as its ancient mark, and that other peoples, above all the Jews, were its enemies. It came from nineteenth-century writers who took Aryan, a name that ancient peoples of Iran and India gave themselves and that scholars used for a family of languages, and made it the name of a race, and who read the sign dug up at Troy as that race's badge.

Every part of it is false. A family of languages is not a bloodline, and there is no Aryan race. The swastika was drawn by peoples of every kind, from Ukraine to the Indus to the Americas, long before any such race was imagined, and its living home is in the faiths of Asia, which never knew the doctrine. The doctrine itself ended in genocide.