Chakravartin, literally wheel turner, names an ideal universal monarch shared across Buddhist, Hindu and Jain literature, a ruler whose righteous conduct causes a wheel, the chakra, to appear and roll before him, marking out the extent of territory he is destined to rule not by conquest through force but through the moral authority his righteousness commands, so that rival kings submit willingly rather than being defeated in battle. Buddhist texts pair the chakravartin closely with the figure of the Buddha, holding that an infant marked with the thirty two auspicious signs will grow to become either a chakravartin, ruling the world through dharma, or a fully awakened Buddha, renouncing worldly rule to teach the path to liberation, the two figures presented as parallel peaks of what a single exceptional birth can become.
Hindu and Jain literature develop chakravartin kingship along broadly similar lines, an ideal of universal, righteous rule achieved through dharma rather than mere conquest, with Jain cosmology in particular including detailed, semi mythological lists of chakravartins who arise across cosmic time. The wheel itself, a chakra with a thousand spokes in some textual descriptions, became a recurring symbol in Buddhist art quite apart from its royal association, most familiar today as the dharmachakra representing the Buddha's own teaching.