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BUDDHIST INDIA
posed to have attained enlighteninent under a tree, The tree differs in the accounts of each of thein.. Our Buddha's “ Wisdom Tree,” for instance, is of the kind called the Assattha or Pippal tree. Now while in all the oldest accounts of Gotama's attainment of Buddha-hood there is no mention of the tree under which he was sitting at the time, yet already in a Suttanta’ it is incidentally mentioned that this event took place under a Pippal tree; and this is often referred to in later books. In these old sculptures the Buddha himself is never represented directly, but always under a symbol. What we have here then is reverence paid to the tree, not for its own sake, and not to any soul or spirit supposed to be in it, but to the tree either as the symbol of the Master, or because (as in the particular case reprcsented in the figures) it was under a tree of that kind that his followers believed that a venerated Teacher of old had become a Buddha. In either case it is a straining of terms, a misrepresentation or at best a inisunderstanding, to talk of tree-worship. The Pippal was a sacred tree at the date of these sculptures, - sacred, that is, to the memory of the beloved Master, who had passed away; and it had acquired the epithet of “ Tree of Wisdom." But the wisdom was the wisdom of the Master, not of the tree or of the treegod, and could not be obtained by eating of its fruit.
These ideas are of course post-Buddhistic. They could have arisen in a perfectly natural way simply because the tradition was that Gotama had, at that crisis in his life, sat under a Pippal tree. And it is IM. 1. 22, 117, 249.
? D. 2. 52.
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
