Painted over doorways, woven into carpets, fired into Ming porcelain, and carved, all eight at once, into a silver shell.
In Tibet you see them long before you learn their names. Over the doors of monasteries and on the lids of wooden chests. In the borders of carpets, on the brass of butter lamps, on the silk that hangs behind a teacher's seat. At Losar, the Tibetan New Year, families still draw auspicious signs in white on their walls and doorways. Travel east and the same eight turn up on the imperial porcelain of the Ming and Qing, where the Chinese called them the bajixiang.
In Sanskrit they are the ashtamangala, the eight auspicious things. In Tibetan, tashi tagye. They almost always travel together, and once you know them you will find them everywhere.
Where they come from
The eight are older than Buddhism. Several began as emblems of Indian kingship, the things carried in procession around a ruler or laid out at a coronation. Buddhism took them over and gave them a new story: the gods, it is said, offered these eight gifts to the Buddha immediately after his enlightenment.
So each symbol carries two layers. Underneath is the older, worldly meaning, which is protection, wealth, victory, good fortune. On top sits the Buddhist reading, where each of those worldly goods turns into a quality of mind. Victory becomes victory over your own ignorance. Wealth becomes something that does not run out by being given away.
The eight symbols, one by one
The Tibetan tradition usually lists them in this order.
1. The Parasol
In India a parasol was held over kings and holy men, a sign of rank and of shade. The Buddhist parasol shelters you from what burns: heat, harm, the scorching of suffering. Its dome is also read as the sky itself, spread over everything beneath it.
2. The Golden Fish
Always a pair. They began as the two great sacred rivers of India, the Ganges and the Yamuna. Fish move through deep water without fear of drowning, so the pair came to mean moving through the world without fear. In China they picked up a second meaning, because the word for fish, yu, sounds like the word for abundance.
3. The Treasure Vase
A round-bellied vase with a lid, full of jewels. However much is taken out, it stays full. It stands for wealth, health and long life, and for the kind of abundance that grows by being shared. Tibetans still fill real vases with grains, herbs and precious things and bury them in places where the land needs healing.
4. The Lotus
Rooted in mud, flowering clean above the water, with no mud on its petals. It is the most familiar image of purity in Asia, and in Buddhism it means a mind that has come up through confusion without carrying the confusion with it.
5. The Conch
A white conch shell, blown like a horn. Its sound carries over valleys and through walls, and it is used to call people together and to open ceremonies. That is exactly what it means: the teaching, heard far off by whoever is ready for it. A white conch whose spiral turns to the right is rare in nature, and especially prized for that reason.
6. The Endless Knot
A single line folded back on itself, with no beginning and no end. It stands for the way everything is tied to everything else, and for the union of wisdom and compassion, neither of which works without the other. In Chinese it is the panchang, and it lives on in the decorative knots still tied in China today.
7. The Victory Banner
A tall cylindrical banner, like the ones you see standing on the corners of monastery roofs. It marks a victory, but not over an enemy. What it celebrates is the defeat of the forces that keep a person from waking up: fear, craving and not-seeing.
8. The Dharma Wheel
The wheel the Buddha set turning with his first teaching, in the Deer Park at Sarnath. That is why so many Tibetan monasteries carry a golden wheel on their roofs, flanked by two deer. Its eight spokes are the eightfold path. It turns, and it keeps turning.
Why they come as a set
Any one of them can stand alone, but the eight are meant to be read together, a complete picture of good fortune in which each covers what the others leave out. Shelter, freedom, abundance, purity, voice, connection, victory, teaching. In Tibetan art they are sometimes gathered into a single shape, stacked into the outline of a vase so that the eight become one object.
That idea, eight things carried as one, is what we built a pendant around.
A conch that carries all eight
The Dharma Conch Pendant took six months from the first drawing to the first finished shell. A conch is a spiral, and a spiral has no flat face to carve on, so every line has to bend twice: once around the body and once along the turn.
We carved the shell as a shell first. The whorl, the swell, the taper into the mouth, all worked until it behaved like the real thing. Only then did the ornament go on. The face opens on a crossed vajra with a turquoise at the crossing, and around it the surface divides into eight fields, one for each symbol, each in its own beaded frame. The tip is cut through, the way a conch is opened to be sounded.
And here is the detail we like best. The conch is one of the eight. So this object is a conch carrying the eight symbols, one of which is the conch itself. The shell holds its own image.
It comes in three editions, and the carving and the turquoise are identical in all of them. Only the gold changes. The pure silver edition has none, so the carving speaks alone. The fire-gilded edition lays 24K gold into the eight symbols and the main borders. The Creation edition carries gold out across the frames, the scrollwork and the bands of the body, each element fired separately. How the gold goes on is explained in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
It measures 55 × 25 × 25 mm (2.2 × 1.0 × 1.0 in) and weighs 31 g (1.1 oz). Every edition comes with both a titanium bead chain and a cord braided by hand in Tibet.
Eight symbols only you will see
The same eight appear in one more place in our work, and most people will never notice them. On the Six-Tusked Elephant God Cuff Bangle, the elephant's head sits at the front of the wrist, where everyone can see it. Turn the cuff over and the underside carries the eight symbols in gold, running in sequence through silver scrollwork, with a turquoise held in a gold rosette at their centre.
They sit against the skin, facing inward. We like that the good fortune is on the side only the wearer knows about.
A note on what we claim
These symbols have carried hope for good fortune across Asia for well over two thousand years, and we write about them as the history and culture they are. We do not claim that wearing them will bring you luck, wealth or protection. What they can do is remind you of eight good things worth keeping in view.
May what is true in you carry further than your voice does.
Dharma Conch Pendant · Six-Tusked Elephant God Cuff · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry
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