The dharma wheel ☸︎
The dharma wheel, or dharmachakra, is the most widely used symbol of Buddhism. It stands for the Buddha's teaching, the dharma, and recalls his first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, known as setting the wheel of the dharma in motion. Its eight spokes represent the Noble Eightfold Path.
The wheel is shared with other Indian traditions: a 24-spoked wheel, the Ashoka Chakra, sits in the center of the flag of India. Unicode's ☸︎ (U+2638) is an eight-spoked wheel, and it also has a color emoji version ☸️.
Other Buddhist symbols
The lotus 🪷 grows out of muddy water and opens clean above it, so it stands for purity and awakening. Prayer beads 📿, called a mala, usually have 108 beads and are used to count mantras. 🙏 shows palms pressed together in a gesture of respect, and 🧘 the cross-legged meditation posture.
The conch shell 🐚 is one of the eight auspicious symbols of Tibetan Buddhism, together with the wheel, the lotus and the endless knot. ༀ is the syllable om in Tibetan script, which begins the mantra "om mani padme hum".
卍, the manji, is an ancient Buddhist sign of good fortune and still marks temples on maps in Japan. Its meaning in Buddhism is entirely separate from the 20th-century Nazi emblem.
How to use Buddhist symbols
Click a symbol to copy it, then paste it into a message, a meditation journal or your bio. ☸︎ and ༀ are text characters, so they take on the color of the text around them, while 🪷 📿 🙏 are emoji. The lotus emoji 🪷 was added in 2021, so very old phones may show a box.
In Microsoft Word, type 2638 and press Alt + X for ☸︎. For the sacred syllable shared with Hinduism and Jainism, see the Om symbol page, and for the Taoist symbol of balance, see yin yang.