we can all reach enlightenment, no matter where we are, what our life stories are. And that's

the sort of radical hope and promise. Hello, I'm Neil McGregor, and in this series of podcasts,

I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies. This episode,

the final one in the series, looks at the wheel of life and the hope of renewal.

This is the BBC.

It's the human predicament and it's the Buddhist view of the universe. It's the story of each one of us.

It's the story of the world in a single, brilliantly coloured painting,

which shows the endlessly turning wheel of life. I'm looking at a tanker, a 19th century Tibetan Buddhist painting

on blue-dyed cotton with a rod through the top to allow it to be rolled up when not in use.

Now in the British Museum,

it was made to hang on the walls of a temple in Tibet or India. The Buddhist Wheel of Life

seems a good place to start the last programme in this series. All the way through from the Ice Age

to today, we've been looking at how communities imagine and enact their place in the

world, a world that's constantly changing and usually dangerous. This tanker does what, as we've

seen, all religions attempt to do. It tells a story, one that connects our individual lives to the

community and to the world of which we are briefly apart.

The rim of the Wheel of Life is pistachio green, and its spokes divided into six sections.

At the very centre in the red hub are the three driving forces which keep turning it and destroying it, which drive our lives

and our world, greed, ignorance and hatred, represented here by a green snake, a black pig,

and a red, strutting cockerel. Left to our own devices, these three beasts will inform our

actions, shape our lives, and take us through births and rebirths

into the six different realms of existence, which are shown in the segments of our wheel.

...