In early Buddhist art, as is well known, the Buddha is constantly represented by a simple seat or throne situated at the foot of a Maha-bodhi-tree [pipal-fig], the Prince of Trees.
                                                        -Ananda K. Coomaraswamy  1

Figs were...female genital symbols....This may account for the common use of the fig tree as a symbol of man's enlightenment, which was formerly supposed to come through his connection with the female principle.     -Barbara Walker  2

THE READING

You are invited to know that you are Nature's beloved child.  Play, move freely as the wind in the branches, run, dance, draw, paint, make toys.  This is not a time to relax and rest -- you are being drawn into an energetic, exhilarating playfulness.  This is not to be interpreted, however, as an invitation to squander your energies aimlessly.  That would only leave you feeling bloated, heavy, disappointed by day's end.  Pipal refreshes and restores.  She returns you to a full heart and light spirit, especially during periods of delay and restraint in external affairs.  The pipal's flowing lightness lessens the rigidity of any obstinacy in or around you.

Remember that what makes us most human is not our capacity to make money, ulcers and war.  It is instead our capacity for play -- creative and abundant forms of play.  Only warm-blooded life-forms can play.  Cold-blooded creatures have curiosity and interest but they lack the metabolic resources for play; thus, whatever free time they have must be used for rest.  As warm-blooded, oxygen-based metabolisms began to evolve, they were able to use free time for play, not rest.  The more they played, the more oxygen they used, the more motor skills they developed, and the larger their brains grew.  Increased brain size allowed for even more elaborate forms of play: dolphins, who have much larger brains than humans, spend much of their lives at play.1

Especially if you are a workaholic, this is your time to be like a dolphin instead.  Focus on your active playful Shakti element.  Yes, balance the male and female -- and maybe your male-side needs to meditate and sort things out, but the urgency of that is better indicated by other trees.  The pipal invites you to go to a far earlier, simpler, playful time -- just sing and leap and claim a great spaciousness around you, even if only for a few hours.

REVERSED:  Lighten up.  You're taking yourself far too seriously.  Everything's going to work out just fine.

1. Jenks:48-49

THE MYTHS

The most famous pipal, or "holy fig," is the majestic one under which the Buddha, seated on a throne of grass, attained enlightenment.  We forget that the Buddha was one of the trees' own.  His mother, Queen Maia, was an incarnation of the White Goddess in her May tree, or hawthorn, guise (see Hawthorn).  The Buddha himself was a tree spirit in thirty of his earlier lives, including one as the King of all tree spirits.3  Thus it is with rich justification that a pipal, India's ancient Tree of Wisdom (bodhi) came to represent the Enlightened One.

The sacredness of the pipal goes back thousands of years to the great Indus Valley cultures of pre-Aryan times.  There, urban centers were flourishing c. 2500-2000 BCE.  Cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro traded with Mesopotamia via the Persian Gulf during this period, exporting ivory, sisu-wood, Afghan lapis lazuli, Himalayan jade, and bright red Indus Valley carnelians.  Since Mesopotamian records tell us that such goods came from a land called Meluhha, that is probably the original name of the Indus Valley civilization.4  Such trade ended abruptly c. 1800 BCE for unknown reasons, although it might reflect Aryan invasions from the West.

Excavations at Mohenjo-Daro reveal a peace-loving people who had few weapons.5  In addition to appreciating and valuing cleanliness (they had indoor plumbing), a great number of ingenious terra cotta toys are clear evidence that these were a playful people whose children were precious to them.6  Many small clay homemade votive statues were also found, most of them depicting mother-goddesses, their nude hourglass-figures bedecked with intricate necklaces, bracelets, hip belts.7  They were made out of lumps of clay, flattened, prodded, poked and coiled into some semblance of a divine image -- clearly, they were fashioned by loving hands, but not very skillful ones.  The crude little statues bespeak an earthy and ancient sense of loving devotion to the fertile mother-goddess of trees, rivers, ritual baths, toys and pots.  The not-very-talented artists seem never to have doubted that the work of their hands, done with love (bhakti), would be perfectly acceptable to her.

Exquisite art was also found here.  One tiny three inch masterpiece, a seal carved of soft stone, depicts a very energetic sacred dimension.8  On the left is a tree-goddess standing between two branches of a pipal.  Her face is in profile, she wears an elaborate crescent-crown and her hair hangs in a long braid.  Her feet are placed in such a way as to suggest that she is about to shift her balance, moving easily from branch to branch.  Worshipping her is a kneeling, masked male accompanied by a huge horned bull-goat.  Across the bottom is a line of seven women, their faces also in profile, their hair braided.  Their feet, like the goddess', appear to be dancing off to the viewer's right.  Unlike Aryan dance, which is thought to have been of the robust jumping, leaping, foot-stomping, hand-clapping variety, Indus Valley dance was probably sinuous, intricate and erotic.  These qualities are later found in the dance of Shiva Nataraj, Lord of the Dance.  The dancers moving across the tiny seal hint at the sexual boldness and grace inherent in such dance.

To the kneeling male's stillness, this pipal goddess and her seven priestesses bring a complimentary element of movement coupled with the above/below, ascent/descent theme connected with cosmic trees worldwide.  We do not know this goddess' identity because Indus Valley script has not been deciphered, but Buddhist legends many centuries later speak of an aboriginal chemist-goddess who protected the sacred pipal tree and who was lovingly adored for twelve years by the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna before she found him worthy of receiving primordial secrets of science.9  If the goddess of the kneeling male is not the same as the one worshipped by the much later Buddhist sage, at least they are kin.

For comparison purposes with the pipal goddess, there is a Mesopotamian carving from about the same period.  It shows a female deity known as the "Mistress of Animals."10  Surrounded by vegetation, she seems full of confidence and power (in India this is shakti, the active-polarity, which quickens passive male gods).  With the agility of an acrobat, the goddess appears to be taming a pair of enormous reptiles while balancing on the backs of a pair of panther-like beasts.  Of special interest are her feet: they are not firmly planted.  The panthers seem stable enough but she seems to have been caught in a "freeze-frame," about to shift her weight, and obviously quite comfortable in responding to the changing dynamics around her.  The feet of the Indus Valley pipal-goddess show a nearly identical placement.  This is not to imply, necessarily, that there was any direct religious influence between the two regions but, as we have seen, there were sea routes between them and the Iraq-Iranian region was also located along a traditional land route to India.

We do not know either goddess' identity with certainty -- but their message is clear.  Balancing the more masculine-attuned spititual technique of withdrawal and passive interiority, which the Buddha developed to its fullest extent while he meditated under his pipal tree, these anciently youthful goddesses offer another spiritual method -- one of active, even playful engagement with the natural world.  They offer a celebration of the female-principle as a powerful force equally involved in life and death, opening out, folding in, inhalation, exhalation.  The mother-goddess' functions had not yet been split:  there was a totality, a sense of flow and wholeness, a bold sense of trust in the processes of nature rather than an anxious attempt to escape from nature.  The "sacred" had not yet been split from the "secular" and art served both with no disjunction between them.

1. Coomaraswamy:39.   2. Walker, WD:484-485.   3. Compiled from the Jataka Tales.
4. Bibby:57; T/L:TF3000:135, 138, 141, 164, 166.   5. Eliade, YIF:357; T/L:TF3000:134.   6.T/L:TFC:125-126, 149, 131; T/L:TF3000:135.   7. T/L:TFC:128-129.   8. T/L:TFC:136.
9. Eliade, YIF:344-345.  10. Larousse World Mythology:57.

THE TREES

The pipal or "holy fig" (ficus religiosa) is one of some eight hundred varieties of fig trees.  It is native to Hindustan and Ceylon and is very long lived -- a Ceylonese tree dates from 288 BCE.1  Although its fruit is inedible, the pipal, like all varieties of fig, produces a milky lac or juice (which is used to treat toothache).2  The pipal has been sacred in India for thousands of years.  A pre-Aryan Indus Valley carving of four thousand years ago shows a nude tree-goddess, her hair in a long braid, standing between the curving limbs of a pipal.  A male accompanied by a bull-goat worships her.  Many centuries later the Buddha attained enlightenment while seated on a grass throne under an ancient pipal.  The tree is frequently found outside Buddhist shrines where it provides medicinal lac as well as a dense and welcome shade from the heat of the tropics.

Most fig trees are remarkable for the balanced degree of gender and species cooperation essential for their female-to-female cross-pollination.  A wasp-like female insect, after brushing through a male flower's pollen, is the only means of pollinating a female flower.  Each species of tree is adapted to its own species of insect, and vice versa.  If the tree species dies out, so will the insects; if the insects die out, their tree-mates will be infertile and eventually die as well.3

Fig flowers are internal.  They are found on the inside of the cup or flask-like vessel which will later develop into a fig.  The flask has an intricate, overlapping opening preventing easy access.  After working her way inside, the female insect (of whatever species is bonded to that specific species of fig tree) lays her eggs inside certain specialized bladder-like gall-flowers which are neither male nor female.  As the insect makes her entrances and exits in these fleshy flasks, she brushes through the pollen of male flowers, transferring it to nearby females.  The insect has no interest in the male or female flowers: she only wants to reach the neuter gall-flowers which can support her eggs.  But in her travels in and out of the flask, she encounters the gendered flowers.  In some species, these gendered flowers are inside the same flask as the neuter gall-flowers -- which simplifies pollination.  Other species create an interesting obstacle course for the insect: the same tree will have "decoy" flasks holding only female flowers as well as flasks holding gall-flowers mixed with male flowers; eventually, the insect will mistakenly enter the female flower flask, hoping to find gall-flowers where she can lay more eggs; unsuccessful, she will exit after first inadvertantly pollinating the female flowers.  Still other species, especially the delicious Smyrna types, have all the female flasks on one tree and all the gall-flower/male flower combination flasks on another, which creates special difficulties in pollination.  Thus, from ancient times, humans have helped cross-pollinate these flowers in a "marriage of the trees" by hanging strings of wild male figs (caprifigs, or "he-goat-figs") in domesticated female trees.4

After the insect lays her eggs, they mature into larvae and finally hatch into male and female insects.  Mating takes place within the developing fig.  Within a few hours the males die, blind and wingless.  The fertilized females, rich with their own eggs as well as with pollen from the flask's just-ripening male flowers, exit that flask and fly to another to deposit their loads.  In exchange for using the fig as nursery and nuptial chamber, the insect insures both species' survival.  And so the strangely balanced, unerringly timed choreography continues, each gender and species playing its own role perfectly.5

1. Lehner:24.   2. Lucas:23.   3. Bor:133-134.   4. Bor:134; Frazer:ii. 313-316;
NG 9/51:346-347.  5. Bor:134.

Text © 2000 by Kathleen Jenks, Ph.D.
Art © 2005 by Sandra Stanton.
22 January 2006:
added painting and put "Reading" at the beginning instead of the end.
All rights reserved.

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