Kris, here is the info from wikipedia, hope it help you.
SwastikaThe swastika (Sanskrit:
??) is an equilateral cross with four arms bent at right angles, in either a right-facing (?) form or its mirrored, left-facing (?) form. Earliest archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization of Ancient India as well as Classical Antiquity. Swastikas have also been used in various other ancient civilizations around the world. It remains widely used in Indian religions, specifically in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, primarily as a tantric symbol to evoke shakti or the sacred symbol of auspiciousness. The swastika is also a Chinese character used in East Asia representing eternity and Buddhism.
The word "swastika" comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix.
The swastika literally means "to be good".Following a brief surge of popularity in Western culture, a rotated swastika was adopted as a symbol of the Nazi Party of Germany in 1920. The Nazis used the swastika as a symbol of an alleged Aryan race. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, a right-facing and rotated swastika was incorporated into the Nazi party flag, which was made the state flag of Germany during Nazism. Hence, the swastika has become strongly associated with Nazism and related ideologies such as fascism and white supremacism in the Western world and is now largely stigmatized there. Notably, it has been outlawed in Germany if used as a symbol of Nazism. Many modern political extremists and Neo-Nazi groups such as the Russian National Unity use stylized swastikas or similar symbols.
In the East, however, the swastika continues to be very popular and widely used, and is a religious symbol of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
NameThe word swastika came from the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote auspiciousness.
It is composed of su- meaning "good, well" and asti "to be". Suasti thus means "well-being." The suffix -ka either forms a diminutive or intensifies the verbal meaning, and suastika might thus be translated literally as "that which is associated with well-being," corresponding to "lucky charm" or "thing that is auspicious."[1] The word in this sense is first used in the Harivamsa. The Ramayana does have the word, but in an unrelated sense of "one who utters words of eulogy".
The most traditional form of the swastika's symbolization in Hinduism is that the symbol represents the purusharthas: dharma (that which makes a human a human), artha (wealth), kama (desire), and moksha (liberation). All four are needed for a full life. However, two (artha and kama) are limited and can give only limited joy. They are the two closed arms of the swastika. The other two are unlimited and are the open arms of the swastika.
The Mahabharata has the word in the sense of "the crossing of the arms or hands on the breast". Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana also use the word in the sense of "a dish of a particular form" and "a kind of cake". The word does not occur in Vedic Sanskrit. As noted by Monier-Williams in his Sanskrit-English dictionary, according to Alexander Cunningham, its shape represents a monogram formed by interlacing of the letters of the auspicious words su-astí (svasti) written in Ashokan characters.[2]
The Sanskrit term has been in use in English since 1871, replacing gammadion (from Greek
). Alternative historical English spellings of the Sanskrit phonological words with different meanings to include suastika, swastica, and svastica.
Other names for the shape are:
crooked cross, hook cross or angled cross (Hebrew:
, German: Hakenkreuz).
cross cramponned, ~nnée, or ~nny, in heraldry, as each arm resembles a crampon or angle-iron (German: Winkelmaßkreuz).
fylfot, chiefly in heraldry and architecture. The term is coined in the 19th century based on a misunderstanding of a Renaissance manuscript.
gammadion, tetragammadion (Greek:
??), or cross gammadion (Latin: crux gammata; French: croix gammée), as each arm resembles the Greek letter ? (gamma).
tetraskelion (Greek:
), literally meaning "four legged", especially when composed of four conjoined legs (compare triskelion (Greek:
?)).
The Tibetan swastika (?) is known as g-yung drung
The Buddhist sign has been standardized as a Chinese character ? (pinyin: wàn) and as such entered various other East Asian languages such as Japanese where the symbol is called ?? (manji). The swastika is included as part of the Chinese script in the form of the character "?" (pinyin: wàn) and has Unicode encodings U+534D ? (left-facing) and U+5350 ? (right-facing).[3] In Unicode 5.2, four swastika symbols were added to the Tibetan block: U+0FD5 ? (right-facing), U+0FD6 ? (left-facing), U+0FD7 ? (right-facing with dots) and U+0FD8 ? (left-facing with dots).
Historical use in the EastThe swastika is a historical sacred symbol both to evoke 'Shakti' in tantric rituals and evoke the gods for blessings in Indian religions. It first appears in the archaeological record here around[18] 2500 BC in the Indus Valley Civilization. Also, the swastika symbol was found on a number of shards in the Khuzestan province of Iran and in inscriptions on pottery in the Neolithic Europe of the 5th millennium B.C. It also appears in the Bronze and Iron Age cultures around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In all these cultures the swastika symbol does not appear to occupy any marked position or significance, but appears as just one form of a series of similar symbols of varying complexity. In the Zoroastrian religion of Persia, the swastika was a symbol of the revolving sun, infinity, or continuing creation.[19][20][21] It rose to importance in Buddhism during the Mauryan Empire and in Hinduism with the decline of Buddhism in India during the Gupta Empire. With the spread of Buddhism, the Buddhist swastika reached Tibet and China. The symbol was also introduced to Balinese Hinduism by Hindu kings. The use of the swastika by the Bön faith of Tibet, as well as later syncretic religions, such as Cao Dai of Vietnam and Falun Gong of China, can also be traced to Buddhist influence.
BuddhismBuddhism originated in the 5th century BC and spread throughout the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BC (Maurya Empire). Known as a "yung drung"[22] in ancient Tibet, it was a graphical representation of eternity.[23]
East Asian traditionsThe paired swastika symbols are included, at least since the Liao Dynasty, as part of the Chinese writing system (? and ?) and are variant characters for ? or ? (wàn in Mandarin, man in Korean, Cantonese and Japanese, v?n in Vietnamese) meaning "all" or "eternity" (lit. myriad). The swastika marks the beginning of many Buddhist scriptures. In East Asian countries, the left-facing character is often used as symbol for Buddhism and marks the site of a Buddhist temple on maps.
In Chinese and Japanese the swastika is also a homonym of the number 10,000, and is commonly used to represent the whole of Creation, e.g. 'the myriad things' in the Dao De Jing. During the Chinese Tang Dynasty, Empress Wu Zetian (684-704) decreed that the swastika would also be used as an alternative symbol of the Sun.
In Japan, the swastika is called manji. Since the Middle Ages, it has been used as a coat of arms by various Japanese families such as Tsugaru clan, Hachisuka clan or around 60 clans that belong to Tokugawa clan.[24] On Japanese maps, a swastika (left-facing and horizontal) is used to mark the location of a Buddhist temple. The right-facing manji is often referred to as the gyaku manji (??, lit. "reverse manji") or migi manji (??, lit. "right manji"), and can also be called kagi j?ji (literally "hook cross").
In Chinese and Japanese art, the swastika is often found as part of a repeating pattern. One common pattern, called sayagata in Japanese, comprises left- and right-facing swastikas joined by lines.[25] As the negative space between the lines has a distinctive shape, the sayagata pattern is sometimes called the "key fret" motif in English.
Swastika on the doorstep of an apartment in Maharashtra, India.
As a pottery graph of unknown provision and meaning the swastka-like sign is known in Chinese Neolithic culture (2400-2000 BCE, Liu wan ??, Qinghai province).
