________________
RELIGION-ANIMISM
231
very possible that the tradition may, so soon afterwards, have been perfectly right. We know as an actual fact that thinking was much more frequent, in that beautiful climate, in the open air, than between four walls. The appreciation of the beauties of nature, so conspicuous in many of the early Buddhist poems, is an Indian, not a Buddhist trait. And it was to a prevalent Indian, not only a Buddhist, sentiment that the Buddha is represented to have appealed, when at the end of some earnest dialogue on a weighty point of ethics or philosophy, he is said to have been wont to close with the appeal : “Here are trees; think this matter out!" It is therefore by no means impossible that it was under a Pippal tree the Buddha clenched the essential points in his new doctrine of life. And, if so, is it not quite conceivable that his disciples should have recollected so simple and natural a fact connected with what they regarded, not only as the turning-point in his career, as his Nirvana, but as the turning-point in the history of the world?
Another hypothesis is possible — that the disciples, in all good faith, associated their Master with this particular tree because it already, before his time, had been especially sacred above all other trees. The tradition may then have been the result of this feeling. The tree was certainly held in high esteem even as early as the Vedic poems. Vessels for the mystic Soma cult were made of its wood; and so were the caskets containing the medicinal herbs used in the mystic craft of the physician of the day. The upper portion in the fire-drill — and the production
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
