A Seat, A Map, A Diagram, A Roofline

The Lotus's use goes well beyond a single fixed emblem: Flood describes it as the standard seat or throne on which deities and buddhas are shown enthroned across Hindu and Buddhist iconography, as the structuring image for the chakras of tantric physiology, each conventionally visualized as a lotus with a specific number of petals, and as the generative form behind the Sri Yantra, recorded separately in this atlas, whose interlocking triangles are read by some interpreters as an abstracted lotus geometry. It also shapes temple architecture directly, lending its form to ceiling roses, finials and ground plans across South and Southeast Asian temple building, so that the same plant supplies, in one tradition after another, a devotional seat, a map of subtle anatomy, a geometric diagram and a piece of load-bearing architectural vocabulary, a range of application unusually wide even among widely shared natural symbols.

Individual deities and buddhas are conventionally shown holding or seated on a lotus with a specific number of petals or in a specific colour, variations iconographers use as one identifying feature among several when reading an unlabeled image, so the plant functions in practice as part of a working visual vocabulary rather than as a single generic attribute applied uniformly to every figure.