Due Date: 17/03/2008
By Raymond Lam
In my paper, I hope to do a short study of the Bodhi Tree at Mahabodhi Temple in Bodghaya and how it brings humanity and nature together in one entity of both symbolic and literal beatitude.
Having spent my life in cities, I have little experience of a sacred space or environment that is completely of nature. This can be a loss to some extent: in the first place, psychologically and physiologically, life in the city can be burdensome. Lynch writes that cities pose a continuous stress by subjecting the inhabitants to unceasing noise; they have a polluted climate; they lack diversity and flexibility, and they are repetitious. (i) Neither is the city the best place to cultivate spiritual growth. Because of transmission of beliefs from older generations, religious beliefs gradually weaken, become less meaningful to the lives of city-dwellers, and perhaps become secularized altogether. Religious observance becomes a social routine and real religious experience dulls. In other words, even ‘sacred spaces’ in the cities can become less meaningful to younger generations. (ii)
But since the religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred (iii), I was forced to look elsewhere apart from the skyscrapers and apartment blocs to discover a physical space to orient my life’s calling. When on pilgrimage to the four sacred Buddhist sites (Lumbini, Bodhgaya, Varanasi, and Kushinara), I found that Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya is a harmony of both humanity and nature. Already surrounded by lush gardens and trees, the ancient Temple is obviously a human structure, but the more important entity is the tall and encompassing Bodhi Tree. It stands proudly behind the Temple and is the object of devotion for many pilgrims. Lovingly tended to by generations of Buddhists, it is the fundamental ‘unveiling’ of the real, under which the Buddha attained the ontological reality. It is also a natural sacred space as the third descendant of the original Bodhi Tree. There are many connections between Buddhist narratives and the tree. When Gautama was challenged by Mara prior to his Nirvana, he touched the soil below the tree and called on the earth goddess herself to testify to his virtue. (iv) The earth quaked, signifying a cosmic event, and the goddess appeared, wringing from her hair a flood of water. (v) At the natural phenomena of the earthquake and flood, Mara fled and Gautama achieved final victory, becoming the Buddha shortly afterwards while meditating under the tree. This narrative is easily interpreted as Buddha’s oneness with nature. The tree has therefore served as an example to future Buddhists, a commemoration of the Buddha’s reliance on the tree, the earth and the cosmic event that occurred there. Therefore despite having built by humans, Mahabodhi Temple contains not only a sacralized Bodhi Tree that relives a cosmic narrative, but also projects a spiritual reality onto a temporal material reality (vi) through natural phenomena like flowers and gardens. For this reason I see the tree as the imago mundi, because it realizes and contains an ontological meaning through a re-sacralization and re-enactment of the Enlightenment. (vii)
Sacred spaces are inevitably grand, requiring homogeneity of space and a hierophany, as well as theophanies and repetition of the space’s cosmogony. (viii) In everyday life one engages in the two existential modes of human existence of the sacred and the profane, and the profane tends to be more common. But at Mahabodhi Temple, where gardens and the Bodhi Tree flourish, a city-dweller can find a balance between human sacralization and an entity of nature that reveals the ontological meaning of the ‘break’ in between profane samsara and the pure universes of the Enlightened Ones – the Bodhi Tree.
Endnotes
i. Lynch (1968) pg. 133
ii. Goodman (1992) pg. 161
iii. Eliade (1959) pg. 28
iv. Harvey (1990) pg. 21
v. Accumulated in the past when Gautama had formalized good deeds by a simple ritual of water-pouring.
vi. Eliade (1959) pg. 28
vii. ibid. pg. 29
viii. ibid. pg. 20 – 36
References
Kevin Lynch, ‘The City as Environment’ in Flanagan, Denis (1968) (e.d.) Cities. New York: Alfred A Knopf
Eliade, Mircea (1959) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. (trans. by Williard R. Trask) New York: Harvest
Goodman, Felicitas D. (1992) Ecstasy, Ritual and Alternate Reality: Religion in a Pluralistic World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Harvey, Peter (1990) An Introduction to Buddhism: Teaching, History and Practices. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press
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