This nineteenth century painting compresses an entire cosmology into one image. A wrathful figure, identified as Yama or possibly Yami, the Lord or Lady of Death, grips a great wheel in its jaws, and within that wheel sit all six realms of rebirth a being can be born into, from the god realms at the top to the hell realms at the bottom. At the wheel's very center, three animals chase one another in a tight ring: a rooster for attachment, a green snake for hatred, and a black pig for ignorance, the three kleshas Buddhist teaching identifies as the root causes that keep beings circling through the wheel at all.
An outer ring, easy to miss beside the wheel's vivid central imagery, depicts the twelve links of dependent origination, the step by step causal chain through which ignorance in one life produces craving, and craving produces the conditions for another birth, and so the cycle continues. None of this is abstract doctrine rendered decoratively. It is meant to be looked at, realm by realm and link by link, as a direct visual argument for why liberation from the cycle matters, painted with exactly that persuasive, didactic purpose in mind rather than as devotional ornament alone.