Om, Mandala, Turtle and Shiva: What the Motifs on a Nepali Bag Mean

Om is held to be the first sound, the one present before anything else and containing everything that followed. It opens a prayer, it is cut into temple doorways, it is embossed on prayer wheels so that turning the wheel sounds it, and it is the single mark most likely to be recognised anywhere from Kathmandu to Ladakh.

The written shape is not an alphabet letter doing duty as a symbol. It is a compound form, and each curve of it is traditionally read as a state of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the fourth state that contains the other three. The small crescent and dot floating above are that fourth state.

You will often see it drawn as fine linework filled with paisley and spirals rather than as a solid mass, as it is on our Om backpack. That is a Newar habit from the Kathmandu Valley: the outline stays exact, and the inside fills with whatever the artist has to hand that day.

The mandala on our backpack and tote is a specific one: a lotus throne at the centre carrying the stacked syllables of the Kalachakra emblem, ringed by eight prayer flag panels. It is worth knowing that the colours are not a palette choice.

Prayer flags come in five colours and they are always strung in the same order, because they are the elements. Blue is sky, white is air, red is fire, green is water, yellow is earth. Hung across a pass or a rooftop, the wind is understood to carry the printed prayers outward, which is why the flags are left to fray rather than replaced when they fade. The fading is the point: the prayer has gone.

The emblem at the centre ties ten syllables into a single monogram. You will see it carved above doorways and painted on monastery walls from Boudhanath to Mustang. On a bag it reads as a quiet thing to carry rather than a loud one.

The turtle is not an ocean motif. He is Kurma, the form Vishnu took in order to sit on the floor of the sea and hold Mount Mandara on his back while the gods and the demons used the mountain as a churning stick to turn the ocean.

What came out of that churning is the whole inventory of the world worth having: the moon, the healing herbs, the wish-granting tree, and at the end the nectar of immortality. All of it depended on something steady staying put underneath while everything above it was violently turned.

So the turtle across the Himalaya does not stand for slowness. It stands for the patience to carry a mountain and not move, which is a rather better thing to have printed on the bag you take to work.

Every element of a Shiva portrait is a compressed story. The river running from his piled hair is the Ganga, which fell from heaven with force enough to split the earth; he caught it in his locks and let it down gently, which is why it reaches the plains as a river rather than a catastrophe.

The crescent moon set into that hair marks time. The third eye on the brow is the one that sees past appearances, and the three horizontal ash lines beside it are the tripundra. The snake at his throat is Vasuki, worn as an ornament by the one god with no fear of what everyone else avoids. The trident is the trishul, its three points usually read as creation, preservation and destruction.

In Nepal he is Pashupatinath, lord of the animals, and his temple on the bank of the Bagmati is the holiest ground in the country. On the night of Mahashivaratri it draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, and the sadhus who walk in for it come from across the subcontinent.

The yak earns its place on a bag by being useful rather than sacred. Above three thousand metres it is the animal that makes life possible: it carries the loads on the trails to Everest, its milk becomes the hard churpi cheese and the butter that goes into salt tea, its hair is spun into rope and woven into tents and blankets, and its dung is the fuel where no tree will grow.

A Nepali child learns to draw one before they learn to draw a cow. Six of them in a row with the word yak written under each, as on our tote, is affection and a joke at the same time: this is the animal, and there is no substitute for it.

People ask, reasonably, whether it is appropriate to carry a religious symbol from a tradition that is not theirs. There is no single Nepali answer, but the common one is that these symbols were never restricted to insiders. Prayer flags are strung where anyone can walk under them, and the Om is cut into public doorways precisely so that everyone passing reads it.

What does tend to matter is care rather than permission. A devotional image, particularly a portrait of a deity, is one that many people prefer not to set down directly on the floor. Knowing that is usually enough.