Bodhi Tree Leaf Views
The Bodhi tree as a symbol was already popular in India, so that elevating the Bodhi tree, or its leaf to sacred status was not a great leap of faith, belief or imagination for most people. In the third century BC, India's King Ashoka bolstered the Bodhi tree's reputation by converting to Buddhism and practising his meditations under the original tree. His Queen, failing to appreciate the subtler points of his time-consuming conversion, had the tree chopped down, in an attempt to regain the attention of her beloved. Ashoka is said to have nourished the remaining stump and its roots with milk, and the tree revived, eventually growing once again to its full stature again. His daughter became a Buddhist nun and transplanted a cutting to a garden in a monastery in Sri Lanka, where it stands today as the oldest continually documented tree in the world.
Bodhi Tree Leaf Images
