Under the Fig Tree

Last month I shared a story about Siddhartha sitting under a Rose Apple tree as a young boy during his town’s harvest festival. Today I’d like to share a story about Siddhartha under the sacred fig, or bodhi, tree. Fig trees go by numerous names- ficus, bodhi, banyon, pippala. In Hindu tradition the sacred fig tree represents the infinite expanse of the universe. It is known as the tree of life. If you have ever sat beneath the 150 year old Banyon Tree in Maui, or a seasoned banyon tree anywhere, you have a sense of the apparent boundlessness of these trees. They send out shoots that root into the ground expanding the reach of the mother tree. The banyon tree in Maui has thrown out new shoots that expand the tree to cover a full block in Lahaina. Although burnt by the fires, this banyon tree is already showing new signs of life.

There is a Black Mission fig tree in my back yard that was planted by my father many years ago. When he was in my home with hospice care he would eat his breakfast out on the deck and enjoy the fig tree. He loved to harvest its abundant blue-black fruits. The fig tree does not require perfect conditions. It is the one tree in my backyard that needs no watering. The ground water, even during a drought, is enough. It is impressively resilient. One year a gardener hacked away at it and I thought it was a goner. But by the next year it had new vibrant limbs sprouting from the previous year’s carnage. Of the many trees in my backyard, this fig tree is truly the most forgiving. My father, like the fig tree, was an expression of abundance growing out of less than perfect soil.

After great discouragement from trying every spiritual technique available to no avail, Siddhartha planted his body underneath a Bodhi tree and vowed not to budge until he found the way out of the suffering he witnessed those many years ago underneath the Rose Apple tree. His resolve to find the answer he was looking for matched the trees resolve to survive and thrive. It is under this tree that, after a night of battling his inner demons, Siddhartha became a Buddha. He observed his body and noticed that none of it was solid or unchanging as he had imagined. In each moment cells are dying and new ones are created. He noticed sensations coming and going and thoughts arising out of nowhere then dissolving without a trace. Sensations and thoughts were clearly not solid or permanent.  What remained that could be called “Me”?  He found that the only constant was nothing and everything, emptiness and interconnection with all things.

The fig tree starts as a seed, sprouts and grows into a tree that gives shade and fruit then eventually returns to the earth to dissolve into the land as soil that will nurture the next generation of seeds. Without resistance to any stage of this constant change or fear of non-existence it continues this cycle over and over, through rain and sun and wind storms. The Buddha emulated the fig tree, not hanging on to any stage or any moment. He learned to flow with the inevitable stream of changes.

I leave you with this excerpt of a poem by Joy Harjo, entitled Speaking Tree;

Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,

But they do not understand poetry—

Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by

Wind, or water music—

Or hear the anguish when they are broken and bereft—

Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth

Between sunrise and sunset.