Treetop

This is the view from the window of our classroom for "Religion of Trees." There are trees to be seen if you peer down, and if you look up. But it's clear they are at best supporting characters in the story of the human city. A useful moral, I suppose. But to get students to think of trees as more than props and backdrops on the stage of human lives and histories perhaps unpropitious. Will they recognize the wisdom in old Max Müller's observation that

Trees, mountains, rivers and the earth seem all very tangible and completely perceptible objects, but are they so? We may stand beneath a tree, touch it, look up to it, but our senses can never take in the whole of it. Its deepest roots are beyond our reach, its highest branches tower high over our head. Besides, there is something in the tree which, for want of a better name, we call its life, and which to an unscientific, and possibly to a scientific generation likewise, is something mysterious, something beyond the reach of our senses, and it may be, of our understanding also. A tree, therefore, has something intangible, something unknowable, something infinite in it. It combines ... the finite and the infinite, or it presents to us something infinite under a finite appearance.

Max Müller, Natural Religion (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1889), 150–51; qtd. in David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (Oxford, 2013), 32