Nariphon

Deep in the Himaphan forest, on the wooded slopes below the Himalayan snow, there are trees that fruit like no others in the world. From the ends of their branches hang young women, each the size and shape of a girl of sixteen, ripe and warm and joined to the wood by the crown of the head. When wind moves through the grove the maidens sway together, and a traveler who did not know better might mistake the sound for singing. Some of them do sing.

These are the Nariphon, and they make the strangest orchard in Buddhist myth. A ripe one is not a carving or a doll but a fruit indistinguishable from a living girl in form, in scent, in the give of the skin under a hand. The old descriptions are precise about the illusion and precise about where it stops. The fruit has hair and a face and the soft weight of a body, and inside it has the organs of a person. It has no bones. Some accounts go further and grant the maidens a kind of borrowed life, small spirits that let them move, sing, and dance for as long as the fruit stays fresh on the branch.

They do not stay fresh for long. A Nariphon holds its ripeness for seven days, and on the eighth it withers and rots where it hangs if no one has taken it. The ones who take them are the gandharvas, the celestial musicians of the heavens, who fly down into the grove, cut the ripe maidens free, and carry them off to their own pleasure. In the deep forest this is simply the season doing what it does. The fruit swells, the fruit is gathered, the fruit that is missed goes soft and drops, and the branch buds another.

The grove has a story, and it is one of the most beloved stories in the Buddhist world. The Vessantara Jataka tells of the Bodhisattva’s last life before the one in which he became the Buddha, when he was born as Prince Vessantara, a man whose generosity was so complete that he gave away the kingdom’s sacred rain-bringing elephant and, in time, his own two children. For this the people drove him out, and he went into the Himavanta wilderness with his wife Maddi and the children to live as a forest ascetic. Maddi kept the family fed. Every day she walked far into the forest to dig roots and gather wild fruit, and every day she walked back alone.

The forest was not empty. Hermits and wandering ascetics lived in it too, men who had won real powers through their austerities, the power to fly among them, and not all of them had emptied themselves of desire. Indra, king of the gods, watching from above, saw the danger to a beautiful woman moving unguarded through such country. So he made the Nariphon. He raised sixteen of the trees and set them at the boundaries of the hermitage, so that any ascetic whose eye fell on Maddi would find, at the edge of the grove, a fruit that looked exactly like a woman and asked nothing of him but to be taken.

The trap was elegant. A hermit who plucked a maiden and lay with her was fed and content for seven days, and then paid for it. The pleasure cost him his powers, his flight and his hard-won meditative absorption, for a full four months, long enough for Maddi to pass unnoticed and unharmed. One version pictures a flier drifting down into the grove, gathering a maiden into his arms, and afterward setting his feet to the earth to rise again and finding that the sky will no longer hold him. He walks out of the forest like any ordinary man.

The Nariphon does not appear in the oldest Pali version of the tale. It is a flourish added in the Thai retellings, grafted onto the most popular of all the jataka stories, and Thailand took to it. In the folklore that grew up around the grove, the trees kept fruiting after Vessantara and Maddi were long dead, bearing their maidens daily in a forest no mortal can reach. The grove will stand, people say, until the Buddha’s teaching is forgotten from the world, roughly five thousand years after his passing, and then the trees and the forest will vanish together.

Something of the grove did reach the ordinary world. In Thai amulet markets one can still buy a Nariphon, a small dried figure with the pinched features and folded limbs of a tiny woman, sold as a talisman of charm, love, and protection and kept by monks and collectors alike. Whether these are carved from a fragrant root or claimed as the genuine withered fruit, they trade on the same old promise, that a piece of that impossible orchard can be carried in the hand.

Their power is a single thing, and it is total within its narrow range. A ripe Nariphon can undo an ascetic who has spent a lifetime hardening himself against exactly this, and it does so without effort, simply by existing and being lovely. Their weakness is the other side of that same coin. They have no will and no defense, cannot walk away or refuse, and were grown to be gathered. And they do not last. Seven days of ripeness, and then the sweet scent turns and the maiden rots on the stem, and the forest goes quietly on to the next crop.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nariphon?

The Nariphon, also called Makkaliphon, is a tree in Thai Buddhist mythology that bears fruit in the exact shape of beautiful young women. Each fruit-maiden is doll-sized and hangs from the branch by the crown of her head. The maidens look and feel human and have the inner organs of a person, but no bones.

Where does the Nariphon tree grow?

The Nariphon grows in the Himaphan (Himavanta), the mythical forest beneath the Himalayas that no ordinary mortal can reach. There its ripe fruit-maidens are gathered by the gandharvas, the celestial musicians, who cut them free and carry them away. In the Vessantara Jataka a grove of the trees also stood at the edge of Prince Vessantara’s forest hermitage.

Why did Indra create the Nariphon trees?

In the Thai version of the Vessantara Jataka, the god Indra created sixteen Nariphon trees to protect Maddi, the exiled Prince Vessantara’s wife, from the lustful hermits of the forest. As Maddi foraged for food each day, any ascetic tempted by her would instead be drawn to the fruit-maidens at the grove’s edge. A hermit who took one lost his magical powers of flight and meditation for four months.

How long does the Nariphon fruit last?

A Nariphon fruit stays ripe for only seven days, after which it withers and rots on the branch if no one picks it. During those seven days a fruit-maiden can, in some accounts, move, sing, and dance. This short lifespan is central to the myth, since the fruit sustains whoever takes it for exactly that span of days.

Are Nariphon amulets real?

Small dried figures sold as Nariphon are genuinely traded in Thai amulet markets, kept as talismans of charm, love, and protection. They take the form of a tiny wizened woman and are prized by collectors and some monks. Whether carved or claimed to be actual withered fruit, they draw their meaning from the mythical maiden-bearing tree of the Himaphan forest.

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