The Lotus in Hindu Symbolism

A lotus has no business being beautiful. It grows in the worst water it can find, in the silt and rot at the bottom of a pond, and it pushes its stalk up through the murk, and when it breaks the surface and opens, it is spotless. Mud runs off its petals and leaves no mark. Water beads and rolls away. A flower born in filth comes up clean.

The tradition noticed this early, and it never let the image go. Of all the symbols in Hinduism, the lotus, padma, may be the most worked, because that one natural fact turned out to carry an entire spirituality.

Clean in the middle of the world

The first meaning is purity, and a particular kind. The lotus is not pure because it grew somewhere clean. It is pure in spite of where it grew. That distinction is the whole point, and it gives the tradition its favourite picture of how a person might live: in the world, handling its mud, and unstained by it.

The Bhagavad Gita states it directly. The one who acts while offering the action to Brahman, says the text at 5.10, is untouched by any fault, as a lotus-leaf is untouched by the water it sits on. In Edwin Arnold’s Victorian rendering, such a soul can no more be stained “than waters mar th’ enamelled lotus-leaf.” This is not withdrawal from life. It is a way of being soaked in life and coming up dry.

The seat of the gods

The second meaning follows from the first. If the lotus is purity itself, then to sit on one is to be shown as a source of that purity, and the gods are shown again and again enthroned on lotuses. The posture even takes the flower’s name, padmasana, the lotus-seat.

The goddess Lakshmi stands on a lotus and holds lotuses in her hands, beauty and abundance rising clean from the depths. And in one of the tradition’s great cosmic images, the creator Brahma is born seated on a lotus that grows from the navel of Vishnu as he reclines on the cosmic waters, which is why Vishnu carries the epithet Padmanabha, the lotus-naveled. Creation itself unfolds, in that image, as a flower opening.

The lotus turned inward

The third meaning is the most intimate. The lotus is not only out in the pond and under the gods. It is inside the seeker.

The Chandogya Upanishad speaks of a city of Brahman, the body, and within it a small lotus, the heart, and within that a space where the Self is to be sought. In Müller’s translation:

“There is this city of Brahman (the body), and in it the palace, the small lotus (of the heart), and in it that small ether.”

Later yoga took this inward flower and multiplied it. The chakras, the centres of the subtle body, are described as lotuses strung along the spine, each with its own number of petals, from the four-petalled centre at the base to the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown. To rise through them is, in the texts’ own image, to pass from flower to flower.

It is worth a careful word here. The petal-counts and colours that fill modern charts come from a specific textual lineage, above all the sixteenth-century Sat-chakra-nirupana that John Woodroffe translated, and the colour symbolism in particular owes much to recent and Western hands. The lotus of the heart is ancient. The tidy diagram is not.

The flower of acting without stain

The lotus-leaf of Gita 5.10 is not a stray simile. It states the heart of the path the Gita teaches, the way of acting without grasping at the fruit of the act. The one who works while surrendering the work to the divine, says Krishna, is untouched by fault as the leaf is untouched by water. This is the discipline the tradition calls nishkama karma, action without craving for reward, and it is the bridge between the lotus as an image and the lotus as an instruction for a life. To act inside the world of consequence, of karma, and to remain unwetted by its results, is in the Gita’s eyes a form of freedom, a step toward moksha taken in the middle of ordinary work rather than in flight from it. The flower that comes up clean from the mud is, finally, a portrait of the liberated person at work.

Sri, who sits on the lotus

The lotus is bound, above all, to the goddess Sri-Lakshmi, fortune and abundance made divine. The Shri Sukta, an early hymn appended to the Rigveda, calls her padma-sthita, seated on the lotus, and padma-varna, lotus-coloured, and asks her to come bearing the flower. She stands on a lotus, holds lotuses in two of her four hands, and is bathed, in her great autumn worship, with water poured over lotus blooms. When households light their lamps for Diwali and open fresh account-books for the year, it is Lakshmi they invite across the threshold, and the lotus is her seat and her sign. The flower that means purity in the abstract becomes, in her, purity that pours out as plenty.

Up from the cosmic waters

There is a cosmology folded into the image as well, and the great art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy spent years drawing it out. In the oldest layer of the symbolism the waters are the unmanifest, the formless deep before creation, and the lotus is the first form to rise from them, the surface on which the manifest world unfolds. That is why the Puranas place the newborn cosmos on a lotus growing from the sleeping Vishnu, and why the same flower serves as the pedestal of so many deities. The lotus is the point where the formless gives rise to form, the still water breaking into a single clean shape. To stand a god upon it is to say, in one picture, that this is where being comes out of the depths.

Petals all the way up

The inward lotus does not stay single. The maps of the subtle body string a series of them along the spine, from the four-petalled centre at the base to the thousand-petalled lotus, the sahasrara, at the crown, the flower of full awakening. The ascent that yoga describes is told, in these texts, as a passage from flower to flower, the awareness rising through one opening lotus after another until it reaches the highest. The image is exact in a way worth pausing on. A lotus opens slowly, from the bottom of dark water toward the light, which is precisely the shape the tradition gives to the inner life. The flower that taught the seeker how to live in the world is also the flower that charts the way out of it.

One image, the whole path

Set the three uses side by side and they are the same idea seen from three distances. Out in the world, the lotus is how to live, clean amid the mud. Above, on the divine seat, it is what the world rises toward, purity made a throne. Within, in the heart, it is where the search actually happens. The flower that begins in filth and ends in light was, for the tradition, too perfect a teacher to use only once.

It grows in the mud. It opens in the sun. The tradition asks the seeker to do the same.