Trishula

Gavin Flood's introduction to Hinduism situates the Trishula within Shiva's iconography as one of several attributes, alongside the damaru drum and the third eye, that identify an image as Shiva at a glance across an enormous range of regional artistic styles; a three-pronged weapon in a deity's hand is read as Shiva or as a goddess closely associated with him, such as Durga, well before any other iconographic detail is examined.

The three prongs carry more than one accepted gloss rather than a single fixed meaning: readings include the destruction of the three worlds or realms of existence, the three gunas or fundamental qualities of Samkhya philosophy that Hindu thought treats as underlying all material nature, and the trinity of creation, preservation and destruction associated with Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva together, and Flood records these as coexisting traditional glosses rather than ranking one as the correct reading. Flood notes that the same three-prong weapon form appears independently in a small number of unrelated iconographic traditions across the ancient world, but treats the Hindu Trishula's specific set of layered readings, the three worlds, the three gunas and the creation-preservation-destruction triad, as a distinctly Shaiva theological development rather than inherited from any of those unrelated appearances.

As a temple emblem the Trishula travelled with Shaivism itself, the branch of Hinduism centred on Shiva, into every region where that tradition took root across South and Southeast Asia, appearing in temple architecture, in the hands of stone and bronze icons, and as a standalone devotional object planted at temple entrances and carried by ascetics associated with Shiva. Durga's use of the same weapon in her own iconography, where she carries it among the array of weapons given to her by the gods for her battle with the buffalo demon Mahishasura, extends the symbol from Shiva specifically to a wider circle of deities understood as drawing on his power or sharing his domain, and Flood notes this kind of attribute-sharing, a weapon or emblem moving between a god and a closely associated goddess, as a recurring feature of how Hindu iconography marks family and power relationships between deities rather than treating each god's attributes as strictly exclusive to that one figure.

Ascetics within Shaiva traditions, particularly certain orders of Naga sadhus, carry a physical trishula as a personal marker of religious identity and, in some lineages, as an actual weapon of self-defence during pilgrimage, a living devotional and practical use running alongside the emblem's purely iconographic role on temples and icons.