Ficus religiosus

Today's was a kind of hinge class in "Religion of Trees." After surveying various human religious uses and relationships with trees in Monday's presentations, it was time to pass the mike to the trees. And who better to do this than the banyan, who explodes ideas of tree as single, straightforwardly vertical analogs to us featherless bipeds? This has been the plan all along, but Mike Shanahan's Gods, Wasps and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees (Chelsea Green, 2016), whose first chapters we read for today, took us even further. 

Banyans are only one of over 750 known species of figs (the picture above shows a banyan Thomas Edison planted in Fort Myers, Florida in 1925); others include the sources of the figs we eat, the pipal under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, and many more, which have anchored forests and fed hundreds of other species for far longer than human beings have been around. (Chronicling figs' prominent place in religious cosmogonies, Shanahan makes a good case for the Garden of Eden's tree of the knowledge of good and evil having been a fig too, something Michelangelo figured out as well!)

Shanahan also stresses that, while not all figs are stranglers, many start their life high up in another tree which they ultimately encircle and overwhelm. (He illustrated his own book; iage at right is on page 10.) Some of these host trees survive but many die, rotting away to leave hollows at the heart of the fig's growing network of trunks and secondary trunks. (This was what one ecologist remembered climbing in at that panel I attended a few weeks ago.) For my students, this punctured the idea that trees are peaceful beneficent beings.

There's lots more where this came from - next week we read the chapter on the lives of the wasps on which fig reproduction relies, "Sex and Violence in the Hanging Garden" - but students already picked up on an unnerving erotic quality to the lithe twining shapes of fig trees in Shanahan's descriptions. One even looked up a poem of D. H. Lawrence's to which Shanahan refers:

Rather like an octopus, but strange and sweet-myriad-limbed octopus; 

Like a nude, like a rock-living, sweet-fleshed sea-anemone,

Flourishing from the rock in a mysterious arrogance. [...]

These polymorphously perverse trees are all the things students had thought trees were not! And yet wasn't it beneath such a one that Gautama the Buddha (among many others) achieved enlightenment?

I called up an image from one of the student presentations on Monday, taken from the cover of a book called Under the Bodhi Tree. Had she perhaps selected that picture because the tree in the background is so very much not like an oak or pine or sequoia? This tangled snarl, this embodiment of the world-shaping power of clinging, even shows the hollow where the tree's long-dead host once lived! She hadn't noticed, she said, but did now - aghast! Indeed all of us (yours truly included) were wide-eyed, as the bucolic scene of the Buddha gently shaded by a giant giving tree unraveled before our eyes. Satori!