NEW!!! Beautiful photograph cards with art by Lily Fong Endlich. This special handmade collection features the LOTUS –
The lotus, a universal symbol in the East is ‘the flower that was in the Beginning, the glorious lily of the Great Waters . . .
that wherein existence comes to be and passes away.’ It is both yin and yang and contains within itself the balance of the two powers; it is solar as blooming in the sun and lunar as rising from the dark of the waters of pre-cosmic chaos. As the combination of air and water it symbolizes spirit and matter; its roots bedded in the darkness of the mud depict indissolubility; its stem, the umbilical cord of life, attaches man to his origins and is also a world axis; rising through the opaque waters of the manifest world, the leaves and flowers reach and unfold in the air and sunlight, typifying potentiality in the bud and spiritual expansion and realization in the flower; its seeds, moving on the waters are creation.
The lotus is the Golden Flower of Taoism, the crystallization and experience of light, the Tao. While on the spiritual level it represents the whole of birth, growth, development and potentiality, on the mundane level it depicts the scholar-gentleman who comes in contact with mud and dirty water but is uncontaminated by it. Apart from its almost endless symbolism, the lotus is a flower of great beauty and highly evocative; as Osvald Sirén says, a sheet of lotus blossom “emanates a peculiar magic, an atmosphere that intoxicates like fragrant incense and lulls like the rhythms of a rising and falling mantra.
Adapted from The Symbolism of the
Taoist
Garden
By J. C. Cooper
Studies in Comparative Religion, Autumn 1977
Reprinted with Permission*