Book Excerpt: The mango in Buddhist symbolism

The heavily pregnant Maya was on the way to her parents’ house in Lumbini, now in Nepal, when labour pains set in. She gave birth to a son in a garden, under a tree. Some sources say the tree was sal (Shorea robusta); others say it was the ashok or the mango or the plaksha (white fig). That’s the nativity story of Siddhartha, better known as Gautam Buddha.

It is one of the most famous lives of ancient times. We have heard the story! Raised inside palaces by protective parents, married at sixteen, becomes a young father. Disillusioned with the pain and sorrows of existence, leaves the palace at age twenty-nine. Subjects himself to great penances to find answers to deep existential questions. Then, six years later, after a forty-nine-day spell of meditation, he attains enlightenment—bodh in Sanskrit—under a peepal tree at Gaya, now in Bihar.

Siddhartha became Gautam Buddha after realizing that (i) suffering is intrinsic to life, (ii) desire causes suffering, (iii) ending desire can eliminate suffering, and (iv) the eight-fold path can eliminate suffering. These are the four truths that launched a religion some 2,500 years ago, one that is followed by half a billion people today. Not to mention the influence on several other religions. Four truths packed within 140 characters! Eat your outhanging heart, X/Twitter!

Having attained inner peace, he could have retired to a life of blissful solitude. Instead, he gave in to the desire to spread his message by travelling across the Gangetic plains. Having renounced worldly things, Buddha was not going to lodge inside houses and palaces. So he stayed outdoors, under the shade of trees, often in mango groves that were ubiquitous in the Gangetic plains. He headed to Varanasi, a centre of learning and orchards and the mango.

He went to a deer sanctuary ten kilometres north of Varanasi; it later acquired the name Sarnath. More than a millennium later, when the Chinese monk Hiuen Tsang or Xuanzang came to India, he went to Sarnath in 637 CE; he found a large monastery with 1,500 monks. ‘In the great enclosure is a vihara about 200 feet high; above the roof is a golden-covered figure of the Amra (mango) fruit,’ he recorded. Why, one might ask, did the summit of the vihara have a golden mango? In early Buddhist sculpture, Buddha was represented through symbols; the mango tree and fruit were prominent among these.

Buddha delivered his first major sermon in the sylvan surroundings of Sarnath. He spoke of Dharmachakra, the wheel of Dharma. That idea has travelled all the way across time to characterize India’s national flag in the navy blue of the Ashoka Chakra, the Mauryan king’s interpretation of Dharmachakra. Buddha’s concerns were existential and universal. He needed an ordinary language to get across to ordinary people: the kind of metaphors that turn abstract ideas into imaginable forms. The mango must have been handy.

An apt example comes from Theravada, the oldest extant school of Buddhism. Its Pali texts contain recollections of Buddha’s disciples of his teachings. In a text titled Puggalapannatti, four types of mangoes become an allegory for four types of humans, contrasting appearance with reality. One, a mango might appear ripe but actually be unripe; two, it might appear unripe but be ripe inside; three, a mango might appear unripe and actually be unripe; or, four, it might be ripe in both appearance and content.

Buddhist literature teems with mango references, most prominently the Jatakas or the 547 retellings of Buddha’s recollections of his past lives. Some texts say Buddha told these stories in the mango groves of Jetavana, a monastery and vihara outside the ancient city of Shravasti, now in Gonda and Bahraich districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh. In the 539th Jataka, an ascetic asks Buddha the reason for his renunciation. ‘The Great Being’ replies in verse worth quoting:

Take a moment to digest that: the mango tree as Buddha’s teacher! Then there’s another story of a magnificent mango tree, perhaps in Vaishali. After eating a particularly delicious mango, Buddha asked his disciple Ananda to plant it at an appropriate spot. Then, he washed his hands above that spot. A grand white mango tree is said to have grown out of it.

The republic of Vaishali produced the most famous story linking the mango and Buddha. It has to do with Amrapali, the stunning courtesan we met earlier. She had heard of Buddha and his teachings and was present at his sermon in Vaishali; it made a deep impression.

One version of this story says she sent him a parrot that talked to people in a human voice. It extended Amrapali’s invitation to Buddha. Impressed by the bird, he accepted the invite and actually stayed at her mango grove. She invited Buddha over to her house for a meal; he accepted.

On the way back, her carriage collided with another. It had rich and influential men from Vaishali going to invite Buddha. They rebuked her as the ‘mango woman’, a euphemism for slut. She got her revenge by telling them Buddha was coming to her house for a meal, not to theirs. At her palatial house, she offered Buddha her mango orchards for the cause of propagating Dharma. Some versions say she offered everything she owned. Buddha accepted. Later, after women came to be allowed inside monasteries, she is said to have renounced the world for the life of a bhikkuni, attaining the peace she could not find in all the power and attention that her charms commanded.

Excerpted with permission from Mangifera Indica: A biography of the mango by Sopan Joshi @2024AlephBooks