DIVINE TREES

 Sushma Joshi, Shangri La Inflight Magazine, 2019

The spiritual heart of Hinduism is deeply entwined with eco-consciousness. It is no surprise therefore to find out that trees are central to the daily worship and evocations of the divine.

The kalpavrikshya, or wish-fulfilling tree, is one of the three valuable treasures that appeared during the churning of the oceans, according to Vedic scriptures. The other was Kamadhenu, the wish-fulfilling cow which fulfilled a supplicant’s every desire. The churning of the oceans or samudra manthan was a contest that took place between the gods and the demons in their search for amrita, the nectar of immortality. Indra, the lord of the heavens, claimed this divine tree as soon as it appeared, and took it to his abode. Some scriptures describe the kalpavrikshya as a metaphor for the Milky Way in the sky. The night-flowering jasmine, or parijat tree, is one of the many trees on this material realm associated with the kalpavrikshya. In my own house, the intense perfume of these flowers still fills my bedroom from a tree which leans onto my roof from my uncle’s garden, and is a daily reminder of the divinity residing within floral forms.

The most visible trees of the Hindu faith is the peepul tree, which is worshipped as the form of Lord Narayan himself. The peepul, or ficus religiosa, once used to be part of a dyad with the banyan (bar in Nepali) tree. The two were planted together to create a chautari, or resting place where travelers weary from the hot sun could rest. The sprawling foliage of the two trees provided a cooling shade.

According to Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha, a plant ecologist and bio-geographer, people in villages used to marry the two trees in a marriage ceremony with a big bhoj feast and music, “just like people did with their children.”  This chautara tradition has now died out with the rise of modern transport and automobiles. “But the peepul tree continues to remain a central part of each tole where it is worshipped with red tika and sacred thread, including in my Sanepa neighborhood,” Tirtha-ji told me.

For the Buddhists, the banyan holds special importance, for it is under a banyan tree in Bodh Gaya that the Buddha gained enlightenment 2600 years ago.

Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha, now 82 years old, received his Ph.D from the University of Grenoble in 1977, and worked for the Department of Plant Resources for 35 years.

He’s also a life member of the Nepal Academy. He mentions the Pancha-Pallava as another important way in which leaves intertwine with Hindu religious practice. The leaves of five trees are dried and tied into a bouquet (known as a “mutha”), and then sold in shops selling religious items. These can be purchased around Dashain or Navaratri. Pancha-Pallava is used for shanti swosti, or for a ritual to bring about peace. 

One of the leaves used in the Pancha-Pallava comes from the chaap tree. According to Tirtha-ji, local mythology says the famous deity of Changu-Narayan was born under a chaap tree. The leaf of the aap or mango tree is another. These leaves are used to decorate the jagge or mandap created out of bamboo to conduct vedic fire rituals, including weddings.

The rudrakshya tree is sacred to ascetics and sadhus who wear a garland of these beads to show their adherence to the Shaivite path. It is also sacred to laypeople who believe a rudrakshya can ward off serious disease and bring about prosperity and good luck.  Rudra is the angry form of Shiva. Various conflicting sources tell the story of how Lord Shiva shed tears--either in the act of compassion for humanity’s distress, or after killing a couple of demons. These tears turned into the rudrakshya beads we know today.

Rudrakshya beads rise in value according to their number of “faces”—a five-faced one is the most common one and sells for around 5-10 rupees, while an one-faced bead goes for lakhs of rupees in the market. The beads are supposed to bring great luck and prosperity. They are also thought by some to have medicinal value. There’s now a thriving market in fake beads due to their perceived spiritual power. In our own house, we have a rudraksya tree which rains down piles of five-faced beads each year. The fleshy blue-black covering is nibbled on by crows and other birds before they are scrubbed with a solution of soapnut. We then send bags of these beads as offerings to various tirthasthal or pilgrimage places—sacred spaces of Shiva worship which we are not able to travel to ourselves.

I asked Tirtha-ji if rudrakshya had medicinal usages. He said he did not know the specifics, but he mentioned that most leaves and herbs of Ayurveda have sarvanga usages, and are not just “one chemical, one medicine” remedies. In other words, leaves, roots, barks, fruits and flowers of various trees, including sacred ones, are used for the overall health of the body, and not just for one specific isolated ailment as in the Western medical pharmacopeia. A trained vaidya or traditional Ayurvedic healer would know the precise usages, as well as toxicological signs, for each part of a tree.

The sal tree holds great importance in Nepali life and culture. Every offering of flowers, colored powders and banana fruit to the deities is offered in a little leaf bowl stitched out of sal leaves. Sal (shorea robusta) is the only tree whose leaves remain green even after a few months of being picked. In addition, they are waterproof and immune to insects. This property has provided people of South Asia with an easily available biodegradable and disposable leaf on which to eat out during ritual feasts, child’s rice feeding ceremony, wedding party and other ceremonial gatherings. Plates (tapari), big bowls (bota) and small bowls (duna) are stitched with slivers of fine bamboo sticks, known as sinka. Elderly women of the household gather to create these food vessels.

Unlike plastic, sal leaf plates can be thrown away with no ecological damage to the environment. Despite the deep ecological intelligence behind these vessels, Nepalese continue to use glittering plates made out of plastic, styrofoam and aluminum tinfoil to eat out in festive gatherings. These non-biodegradable plastic objects break down into a soup of microplastic, polluting sacred rivers and fertile agricultural land. The Western scientific worldview which permeates our educational system makes the biodegradable leaf bowl appear backward, a primitive object made with little engineering skill and therefore of no value. This devaluing of indigenous culture has led to life-threatening pollution in the entire region.

The Kapoor or camphor tree is also sacred to Hindus. It has also been used in Ayurveda, the healing system of the Indian subcontinent, for over 4000 years. Although it is not worshipped as a form of the divine like the peepul or the banyan,  the camphor extracted from the tree is used as a sacred offering for deities. The incense made from camphor is thought to have medicinal value, especially for respiratory distress and for pacifying the nervous system. It may also keep away microbes, termites and destructive insects. Nepali incense (bateko dhoop), which is made out of various herbs tied together in lokta paper and twisted, always contains camphor.

The bel patra or bel leaf is offered to Lord Shiva at Pashupatinath, Nepal’s most sacred Shiva shrine. According to folklore, Lord Shiva loves this leaf the most. The bael tree is believed to be a manifestation of Parvati, Lord Shiva’s consort. The Shri Shuktam of the Rig Veda mentions that goddess Lakshmi, the consort of Lord Vishnu and the goddess of wealth and prosperity, resides in this tree. Since Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva embody the trimurti or three manifestation of the same divine force, seeing the tree as consort of both Shiva and Vishnu is not an illogical paradox.

In a similar fashion, the pomegranate tree is viewed as the abode of Laxmi, as is the coconut tree. The fruits of both are offered to the goddess. Both fruits are abundant in nutritional value, and anybody eating these fruits are sure to enjoy the benefits of prosperity that comes from being in good health.

The bael (aegle marmelos) tree is also used in a special ceremony by the Newar community to protect girls against widowhood. Before a girl reaches puberty, she is married to a bael fruit, in which Lord Vishnu is thought to reside. Even if her human husband dies, a girl who has done a Bel Vivaha will never be a widow, since she is the eternal consort of the divine protector. In a similar fashion, Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai was widely reported to have married a peepul tree before her marriage to Abhisekh Bacchan to offset the effects of the planet Mars being placed in an inauspicious house in her kundali chart. Although this tradition doesn’t exist in Nepal, it illustrates the belief of the divine presence within sacred trees.

A small amount of sandalwood paste, consecrated from the puja ceremonies at Pashupatinath Temple, is spread on the bel patta before it is applied to the forehead. Sandlewood or chandan trees, both red and white, are very sacred to Hindus. When the wood is rubbed on a stone surface with water, it produces a milky, aromatic paste which is considered a gift of Shiva, and which is applied to the forehead to awaken the inner senses and make one conscious of the presence of the divine. In Ayurveda, chandan is used to treat skin diseases and also to keep the body cool during the hot season. The red sandlewood tree takes much longer to grow, and is now an endangered species whose trade is prohibited by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). This has led to a thriving smuggling trade. In 2011, India had to request Nepal to stop the smuggling of Indian red sandlewood to China, logs of which were being smuggled via Nepal.

Hindus revere trees for multiple reasons, but their primary reason is simple: the divine is not anthropomorphic, but can shape-shift and enter any form, including those of trees. Embedded in this worldview is a deeply biocentric view of the world. The samsara or manifestations of existence is not just seen through anthropocentric or human-centered eyes, but through the eyes of all beings, whether human, animal, plant, or tree. How can a tree containing Vishnu the protector be chopped down? How can a tree which showers the tears of Rudra onto the ground not evoke a deep universal empathy for the suffering of all beings in the person who wears a garland of his tears? How can a tree which spreads the essence of dharma onto people through its perfume not be more precious than gold?