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I slept for an hour or more under the bo-tree, held sacred by the worshippers of Buddah, in front of those strange, fantastic, and gigantic remains of a bygone age and people. When I awoke, there was Solon sitting exactly in the attitude in which I had seen him when I went to sleep. The moment I opened my eyes, he began to lick my face and hands, and to show every sign of satisfaction.
During the years which intervened until his passing away, Bok sought to keep in touch with Father Kipling, and received the most wonderful letters from him. One day he enclosed in a letter a drawing which he had made showing Sakia Muni sitting under the bo-tree with two of his disciples, a young man and a young woman, gathered at his feet. It was a piece of exquisite drawing.
The available grounds about the temple are crowded with palms, tree-ferns, and flowers. There is also a fine old bo-tree dominating the place, which attracts the usual devotional attention of all true believers, and concerning the antiquity of which there is the usual amount of credulity.
Surrounded by innumerable Bodhisatwas, he sits enthroned under a Bo-tree in Sukhavati, i.e., the Blissful, a paradise of heavenly joys, whose description occupies whole tedious books of the so-called Great Vehicle.
A tree that passes for this one was discovered by a Chinese, still standing twelve hundred years after the death of the Buddha; and the bo-tree of Ceylon is regarded as its legitimate descendant. You have been told something about it. "In Benares, having ascertained the cause of human misery, and learned the remedy for it, the Buddha began to preach his peculiar salvation.
The manifold details of the Buddha's traditional career are vividly pourtrayed on the hoary walls of volcanic trachyte in outline clear and sharp, as though the sculptors of the eighth century had just laid down burin and chisel. The indented leaves of the Bo-Tree, beneath which the Sage meditates, are so exquisitely carved that they almost seem to flutter in the breeze.
But these are only the dark and seemingly forsaken hours in which men sit in despair beneath the juniper-tree and imagine that all the world has gone wrong. The juniper-tree in Christianity is the exception; the Bo-tree of Buddhism, with the same despondent estimate, is the rule. No divine message came to show the Buddha a brighter side.
These sprang up after Gautama's death, and their growth extended through many centuries many centuries even of the Christian era. The legends divide the life of the Buddha into three periods: 1. That of his pre-existent states. 2. That part of his life which extended from his birth to his enlightenment under the Bo-tree. 3. The forty-five years of his Buddhaship.
He wanted to strive for nothing, except for what the voice commanded him to strive for, dwell on nothing, except where the voice would advise him to do so. Why had Gotama, at that time, in the hour of all hours, sat down under the bo-tree, where the enlightenment hit him?
I remarked the leaves, which were constantly moving, like our own aspen. Its leaves were heart-shaped, with long attenuated points, and were attached to the stems by the most slender stalks. I had no difficulty in recognising it as one of the sacred bo-trees of the Buddhists. The great bo-tree of Ceylon was planted B.C. 288 years.
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