In Buddhist art the elephant announces the Buddha's conception, carries the bodhisattva Samantabhadra, serves the ideal king and stands for the mind in meditation teaching. In Chinese its name sounds like the word for good fortune, so the elephant is also a symbol of luck and peace.
Queen Maya's dream
According to Buddhist legend, Queen Maha Maya dreamed that a white elephant with six tusks entered her right side. The dream was read to mean she had conceived a son who would become either a world ruler or a buddha. In the Pali telling, the elephant held a white lotus in its trunk. Sculptors in ancient Gandhara, in present-day Pakistan, carved the scene in stone around the 2nd century, and examples survive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum.
Samantabhadra's six-tusked elephant
Samantabhadra, Puxian in Chinese and Fugen in Japanese, is the bodhisattva who represents kindness or happiness. He often appears in a trio with the Buddha and Manjushri, seated on an elephant with six tusks or three heads. In China he is the patron of Mount Emei in Sichuan. Buddhist teachers read the six tusks as the six perfections: generosity, morality, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom.
The precious elephant and the tamed mind
A 19th-century Tibetan temple banner at the Rubin Museum shows the seven treasures of a chakravartin, a universal "wheel-turning" monarch: the wheel, jewel, queen, minister, elephant, horse and general. Robert Beer describes the precious elephant as white, with a jewel on its saddle blanket. Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche teaches that because this elephant is peaceful and tame, it stands for mindfulness.
An untamed elephant pictures the untrained mind. In Tibetan paintings of calm abiding, or shamatha, the monk with a hook and a rope is the meditator, the elephant is the mind and the monkey is distraction. A black elephant stands for dullness. Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources traces the image to the Indian teacher Asanga in the 4th century and later to Tsongkhapa, and thinks the painted version may date only from the 19th century.
Taiping youxiang: peace has its signs
In Chinese the word for elephant, xiang (象), sounds like xiang (祥), good fortune, and also means "sign." A vase is ping (瓶), which sounds like the ping of taiping, peace. So an elephant carrying a vase spells taiping youxiang (太平有象), "when there is peace, there are signs." The Brooklyn Museum notes that Qing processions for the emperor's birthday included real elephants carrying vases on their backs.
Ganesha and the raised trunk
In Hinduism, the elephant-headed Ganesha is the god of beginnings and a remover of obstacles, worshipped before any major undertaking. Popular lore about the trunks of elephant figures does not agree. Reader's Digest describes "trunk up for good luck" as a North American belief, with the raised trunk showering luck. A Chinese feng shui column in Southern Metropolis Daily reads it the other way: a trunk curled down draws in water, which stands for wealth, while a raised trunk wards off bad influences.
Elephants at Buddha.store
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