Bodhi Tree

Also Known As: Pali and Sanskrit bodhi, “awakening”; Pali assattha; Sinhala bo; also the Mahabodhi Tree, the Sri Maha Bodhi, the Bo Tree; botanically Ficus religiosa, the sacred fig
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It is the one patch of ground in the world held capable of bearing a Buddha at the moment of his awakening, and the Kalingabodhi Jataka has a flying king’s elephant unable to pass over the spot at any height.
Role in Mythos: It is the seat of the enlightenment itself, the place where Siddhartha Gautama sat down as a man and stood up as the Buddha.
Relation to Humans: Pilgrims have come to it for well over two thousand years, circling it, sitting under it, and catching its falling leaves before they touch the ground. The Buddha is said to have authorised its worship during his own lifetime as a shrine of use rather than a shrine of relics, which makes it the one object of Buddhist devotion that was approved by the man it commemorates.

Pilgrims at Bodh Gaya stand under the branches with their hands open, waiting. The tree sheds leaves all year, heart-shaped and pulled out at the tip into a long thin tail, and a leaf caught in the air before it lands is worth carrying home across an ocean. The stone below has been worn smooth and pale by foreheads. Butter lamps and marigolds thicken the heat, and over all of it runs the dry continuous rattle of a fig tree moving in a hot wind.

The tree is a sacred fig, Ficus religiosa, and it grows on a raised terrace against the western wall of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bihar, on the banks of the Niranjana. UNESCO, which inscribed the complex in 2002, calls it the most important of the seven sacred places inside the enclosure. That is a modest way of putting it. Buddhists count Bodh Gaya as one of the four holy sites of the Buddha’s life and this tree as the cradle of the whole religion.

What happened here is told with very little decoration. Around the fifth century BCE, at a village then called Uruvela, Siddhartha Gautama gave up six years of starving himself, accepted a bowl of milk-rice, and sat down under this fig with his back to the trunk and a vow not to rise until he had the answer. Mara came for him. The Evil One brought an army, wild animals, and his own daughters, who were desire wearing faces, and he demanded to know by what right the man under the tree claimed the seat. There was nobody there to speak for the Bodhisatta. So he reached down and touched the ground, and the earth itself thundered that it stood his witness. That gesture became the commonest image in Buddhist art: the seated figure, right hand hanging over the knee, fingertips on the soil. In Thailand and across mainland Southeast Asia the earth takes a body and a name, and Mae Thorani wrings a flood out of her hair to sweep the army away.

He stayed seven weeks. The second of them is the strangest and the best. He got up, walked a short distance north, turned, and stood looking at the tree for seven days without blinking, in gratitude for its shelter. A prayer hall on a raised platform still marks the spot. He walked eighteen paces back and forth in the third week, and carved stone lotuses set into a low platform show where his feet went. He spent the fifth week under a banyan answering questions from brahmins, the sixth beside the lotus pond, the seventh under a rajayatana tree to the southeast. Every one of those places is pointed out to visitors today, which tells you how early people started keeping track.

They started very early indeed. The Kalingabodhi Jataka records Ananda asking the Buddha how many kinds of shrine there are, and being told there are three: a shrine for a bodily relic, one for a thing used or worn, and one raised in memory. A body-shrine could not be made while he lived. A memorial shrine rested on imagination only. But the great bo tree under which Buddhas wake is fit to be honoured, the Buddha said, alive or dead. On that ruling Anathapindika planted a seed from the Gaya tree at the gate of Jetavana, Moggallana catching the fruit as it fell and before it struck the ground. It shot up fifty cubits, and the Buddha consecrated it by sitting under it one night. Because Ananda had suggested the whole thing it is still called the Ananda Bodhi. The same story has a king riding through the sky come to a halt above Bodh Gaya, unable to drive his elephant over that patch of ground however hard he beat it.

Two centuries after the enlightenment, Ashoka came, built a shrine and a stone balustrade, and set a polished sandstone slab beneath the branches to mark the exact seat, the Vajrasana or diamond throne. He is said to have loved the tree so extravagantly that his queen Tissarakkha grew jealous of it and had it poisoned around 254 BCE. It came back. Before that, in 288 BCE, his daughter Sanghamitta had carried its right branch across the sea to Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, where the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi still stands and is the oldest human-planted tree anywhere with a recorded planting date. The tree at Gaya was cut or burned again under Pushyamitra Shunga in the second century BCE, and again around 600 CE by Shashanka, the Shaivite king of Gauda, who according to the pilgrim Xuanzang had it hacked to the roots and burning coals heaped on the stump. Xuanzang, who reached Bodh Gaya in the 630s, reports that it came up again within months, that King Purnavarma bathed the roots with the milk of a thousand cows, and that a high wall was built around what was left.

Nothing saved it forever. Alexander Cunningham examined it for the Archaeological Survey in 1862 and found one living stem with three branches to the west and everything else barkless and rotting, and noted that Buchanan Hamilton, seeing it in full vigour in 1811, had thought it no more than a hundred years old. Cunningham watched it decay through 1871 and 1875, and in 1876 the last of it went over the western wall in a storm. Seeds had been collected and young scions were already waiting. He planted the present tree in 1881, raised from the Sri Lankan descendant of the tree Sanghamitta took. The tree standing at Bodh Gaya today is not the tree the Buddha sat under, and nobody at Bodh Gaya pretends it is.

What the place gives is continuity of use. Bodhi puja venerates the tree and the deity held to live in it, the rukkhadevata, in a form of tree worship older than Buddhism and folded straight into it. Bodhi Day falls on 8 December, and the heart-shaped biscuits baked for it are a very small echo of the leaf. The tree is on the state emblem of Bihar. Each Buddha of the tradition has his own species of tree: a banyan for Kassapa before him, the ironwood naga tree waiting for Metteyya to come, the assattha for Gautama alone.

Its weakness is the obvious one and it has never been fixed. The thing is a tree. It can be poisoned, burned, felled, blown down, and it has been all four. It suffers root rot, fungal infection, insects, and the slow strain of its own branch weight, and since 2007 the Forest Research Institute has sent scientists to sample it, prune it and keep it standing, with cloning discussed as insurance. There is a deeper limit underneath the horticultural one. A shrine of use draws its whole authority from the unbroken fact of having been used by the Buddha, and a living thing is the single worst material in which to store an unbroken fact.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bodhi Tree?

The Bodhi Tree is a sacred fig, Ficus religiosa, growing beside the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar, India, on the spot where Siddhartha Gautama is said to have attained enlightenment and become the Buddha. It is the holiest tree in Buddhism and the centre of one of the four great pilgrimage sites of the Buddha’s life. The word bodhi means awakening.

Is the Bodhi Tree at Bodh Gaya the original tree?

No. The tree standing there now was planted by the archaeologist Alexander Cunningham in 1881, after the previous tree was destroyed in a storm in 1876. It was grown from the Sri Lankan Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura, which was itself raised from a branch of the original tree carried there by Ashoka’s daughter Sanghamitta in 288 BCE, so the line of descent is unbroken even though the individual trees are not.

What happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree?

Siddhartha Gautama sat down beneath the tree and vowed not to rise until he understood the truth. Mara, the Evil One, attacked him with an army and with his own daughters and challenged his right to the seat, and with no witness to speak for him the Bodhisatta touched the ground and the earth answered that it stood witness for him. He attained full enlightenment that night and stayed in the surrounding area for seven weeks.

Why did the Buddha stare at the Bodhi Tree for a week?

During the second of the seven weeks after his enlightenment, the Buddha stood a short way from the tree and gazed at it without blinking for seven days, in gratitude for the shelter it had given him. The place is marked inside the Mahabodhi complex by a prayer hall on a raised platform, the Animeshlochan Chaitya.

How many times has the Bodhi Tree been destroyed?

The tree has been killed or badly damaged at least four recorded times: poisoned around 254 BCE by Ashoka’s queen Tissarakkha, attacked during the persecution of Buddhism under Pushyamitra Shunga in the second century BCE, cut to the roots and burned around 600 CE by King Shashanka of Gauda, and finally destroyed by a storm in 1876. Each time a new tree was raised on the same spot from surviving seeds, saplings or roots.