The Wheel of Life

Halos are one of the things we have talked about in our previous English classes. Using Botticelli's Venus as a starting point (or so I believe) we looked what the halos meant. Now after seeing the artifacts in India, of Buddhism, I understand how far back the halo goes. In Buddhism, there is a phenomenon called "Dharmachakra." "Chakra" literally means means "wheel." And dharmachakra is the "wheel of life." This wheel turning represent the events of life unfolding before us, and the continuation of the events in one's life. After Siddhartha became Buddha and taught people his lessons and preached for many years, Buddhism became quite the thing in India. Many now believed in karma and reincarnation. One of Buddha's teaching was about this wheel of life and he is often depicted in sculptures as turning the wheel by doing certain moves with his hands.
Soon after Buddha died, many artist (even Romans of the Helenistic Period) went on to make sculptures of Buddha. Now since one of the most important things that made life go on according to Buddhism was the dharmachakra, they had to insert it in to the sculptures somehow. There were two ways of doing this, one as I just mentioned, by Buddha's gestures and secondly by inserting a circle circumscribing Buddha's head. Sounds familiar?
Later with the English and other European people coming to the peninsula, this image was stolen, so to say. This round circle was taken from the Buddhists and was integrated into Christianity as the halo that we see in nearly all of the depictions of angels. This quite certainly puzzled me, and reminded me of how religions actually do go hand in hand.