Forlong - Rivers of Life

Tree Worship.
engraved his mandates thereon, as was his wont, and placed it in the middle of
his capital.
The cosmical Genesis of
Boodhism confirms what I
hope to establish in the course
of this work—that the Tree
and Serpent are the oldest of
symbolic faiths, and as these
embrace my second, we have
thus the three first streams.
The Ficus, say Hindoos
and Boodhists and all Easterns,
is more peculiarly sacred
when entwining the palm, and
hence they are constantly
sown together; when thus
embracing they say Kālpa is
Fig 4.—A SIVAIK TEMPLE, SACRED WELL, AND TREE AND SERPENT POLE
developed, for the Ficus is here the female energy, and the embrace causes the
revolutions of Time, and the whole is “the Tree of Life.” I have heard very modest
young Boodhist priests explain this extraordinary marriage and dilate on the
importance of Kālpa. in a way I shall not attempt here.
Far back in mythic ages, says Boodhism, sprang up the Kālpa Raksha, which
produced all that early man, then immortal, required; even sun, moon, and the five
planets succeeded this Kalpa, which we may translate with Colonel Forbes Leslie as
“an immensely extended period of time;” whilst Raksha, (or, as some spell it, without
corresponding advantage to the philologist, and great perplexity to the reader who
desires to remember what he reads, Wruksha), “the tree producing all things
desirable,” a highly Kal-IOnic meaning, of which more hereafter. This Kālpa
Raksha exists, says the Cosmogony, “at the foundations of the world, beside the great
original Nāgas”—those expanding Cobras di Capellos “possessing human intellects.”
It appears that with this “tree of knowledge,” which “produced all things,” man, as
usual in such cases, “waxed wicked,” when all things were for the fourth time
pronounced by the Creator a failure, and as the Greeks said, “Zeus made Pandora,”
which the poet Burns expresses in a similarly brief way. It appears that then great
varieties of plant sprang up, when men “eat of them, became mortal, and
found themselves in darkness,” and discovered that they were male and female,
and that they were “liable to mental passions, such as envy, covetousness, and
ambition, and in addition to corporeal passionsm” which is as discreet a way of putting
before us strong subjects as possible; it is added, “the race which now inhabits
the earth became subject to all the evils that afflict humanity;” and “after their
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