Forlong - Rivers of Life

Tree Worship.
who ever loved dark woods and lonely places, sent to this island bccause an object
which they were eertain would be there gladly accepted.
It is a matter of history, that the three Boodhas who preceded Sbkya Mooni
knew Ceylon and by separate names; 1 and also that all had, like Gotama, specific sacred
trees; his being known as the Bo of Bood Gaya, long before the days of Asoka, or the
third century B.C. The Mahāvānso says that the Ceylon Ficus was a slip from it
received about the middle of the third century B.C. and planted in the centre of the
then great and royal city of Ano-rāda-poora, a curious name, the ancient signifciation
of which we would like to know; Anoo is an elephant in Tamil, and Barman
Boodhists worship the white elephant. In the eyes of all the millions who, as I
have said, have here worshipped for twenty-two centuries, the tree represents their
great prophet, and is the type of a faith which they consider is “ever young,” for
like the serpent of Apollo, the Banian ever “renews its youth.” Colonel Forbes
Leslie, in his Early Races of Scotland gives us a beautiful drawing of it as spreading
in wild and graceful profusion over raised and prettily built terraces, and not looking
by any means an old tree. The local traditions are that Dharma-Soka, king of India,
sent the original slip to the King of Ceylon by the hand of the priest Sangha Mita
in 307 B.C.
Sakya is said to have reposed under the parent tree on his becoming Boodha after
his long sojourn and fast in the wilderness for forty-nine days. He had then mastered
all deadly sins and every fear, baving overcome death and entered upon the joys of
perfect quiet and peace; then it was he saw his way to enter upon the duties of
his mission.
Boodhists often have a sacred shrub in a pot to represent this tree, or to remind
them of it, at least so they say, but the fact I believe to be, just as in the case of the
Hindoos with their sacred Toolsi and some other shrubs, that the potted shrub or tree
is an emblem of the old and first worship of man, of which many traditions have
departed and the very memory of them passed away.
Colonel F. Leslie tells us in a note at foot of page 174, vol. I, of Early Races.
that Vance describes a sculpture of a. tree in a flower-pot, as dug out of the ruins of
Hagar-Kim in Malta, which is considered “an emblem of Phenician worship, such as
that still practised in Sardinia, where the vase and the plant of corn growing in it
represent a part of the worship of Hermes, in ancient times called the garden of
Adonis;” 2 for which we are referred to Forrester’s Sardinia, p. 334. This is exactly
what might be expecred. Adonis is the Sun of fertility, the god of Love; Hermes is the
pillar or Lingam god, and the stems of all trees represent him, and are very commonly
called the Lāt or pole, or sacred Toth of Boodhism; from Lāt we still have the
common words Lātti, a walking stick, and Lakree, any stick or piece of wood. The
1
It was called Oja, Warad, and Mada, in the times of the three Boodhas Kakoosanda, Konagama, and
Kasyapa respectively.
2
[Cf. Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris, I. 236-259. — T.S.]
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