Bael Out!

In mid-March, the thorny bael or the bilva tree is bereft of leaves. But it is still laden with large globular fruit. The utterly pragmatic Brits called these stone apples. Indian mythmakers, who likened them to the breasts of Sri, the Goddess of Wealth, went to the other extreme.

More macabre is the local name Sirphal, which ostensibly comes from the resemblance of its hard shell to the skull that encases soft tissues inside. However, it’s more likely to be corrupted from ‘ Sri-Phal’, which associates the tree with the Goddess Sri.

Another tradition likens the three-lobed leaf of the bael to the three eyes of the Mother Goddess. But the more popular version links bael’s trifoliate leaves to Shivji’s trishul that the three-eyed god bears in his right hand.

So much so, the worship of the blue-throated god is deemed to be quite incomplete without bael leaves. The connection between bael leaf and ritual worship of Shiva is so potent that great merit is believed to accrue even to one who accidentally drops the leaves on a Shiva-linga.

The Shiva-Lilamrita tells the story of the hunter Suswara who spent the Mahashivaratri night in a bael tree. Sleepless due to hunger and thirst, he kept thinking of his wife and family continually plucking the leaves and dropping them to the ground.

Eventually, when he dies, Yama conveys him to Heaven all because of that single night he had unknowingly worshipped a Shiva-linga located at the base of the bilva tree! The green moral of the story for modern times is: Gods are where the trees are: take good care of ’em.