This section exists because of a promise made on our first mission: every symbol on this site explained, so you can explain it to your children.
That is the whole ambition. Not a glossary, and not a list of meanings copied from other lists. A child asks what the shape drawn in rice is, or why the flag has five stripes, or which one of the identical statues is Mahavira, and a parent should be able to answer without guessing. These pages are written so that the answer is available in the house.
Two rules govern everything here, and they are worth stating before you read further.
Where the traditions differ, both readings go on the page. Shvetambara, Digambara, Sthanakvasi and Terapanth do not agree about iconography, and on several points they disagree sharply. Sthanakvasi and Terapanth Jains use no images at all, on a doctrinal position with a documented history and named acharyas behind it. Nothing here is written as though one tradition’s practice were the Jain practice, and the home shrine page in particular is written for households with a murti and households without one, in that order of care.
No symbol here acts on anybody. Jainism has no creator, no judge and no intervening power. The devas of the cosmology are real and are also unliberated, working off their own karma inside samsara: fellow travellers, not saviours. So nothing on these pages will tell you that a figure drawn on a door, a colour on a flag or an emblem beneath a statue protects the person who has it. What a symbol does, it does to the person looking at it. That is a smaller claim, and it is the true one. The standard behind it is set out on our method page, and where we have got something wrong it goes on the corrections page with a date on it.
The guides
- The ashtamangala. The eight auspicious symbols, with the Shvetambara and Digambara lists side by side, and the svastika explained properly: the four gatis, the three jewels, the siddhashila, and the plain historical fact of its twentieth-century appropriation in Europe.
- The Jain flag. Five colours for the five parameshthi, why there is no god and no founder on it, how it differs from the 1974 Jain emblem and from the dhvaja on a temple shikhara, and how old it honestly is.
- The 24 lanchhanas. Every Tirthankara emblem drawn and linked to its life, why Jina images are made deliberately alike, the four entries where the traditions genuinely disagree, and how to identify an image whose pedestal is broken.
- The ghar derasar. The home shrine: what it holds, what happens in front of it, what to know before installing a consecrated image, and what an image-free household keeps instead, which is a schedule rather than an emptier shelf.
More will follow: the dhaaga, the tika, the mala, the yantra, and the things worn rather than kept.