Happy Tree!

Globes of fire-and-gold flowers peek from Ashoka's parrotgreen foliage in our garden. The “spiritual” side of your columnist would like to greet this as a happy augury of a living link that connects us to a perennial tradition.

Buddhists, for instance, regard the Ashoka as being sacred: for, Queen Mahamaya supposedly gave birth to Siddhartha Gautama under an Ashoka that sheltered her in a garden while she was travelling to her father's palace near Lumbini for delivery.

Archaeologists recently uncovered a Bodhigara, or a tree shrine, at the spot what is claimed as the world's oldest Buddhist shrine. According to Buddhist tradition, the Queen died within a week of delivery and her sister, Mahaprajapati Gautami, brought up the future Buddha with the utmost care.

Later, she became the first woman to successfully petition the Buddha for ordination into the Sangha and she also lived to the ripe old age of 120! Intriguingly, Mahaprajapati was so named because of a prophecy that she would have alarge following.

So was her sister Mahamaya's early demise predicted as well? In this context, the atheistic side of your columnist does wonder if the mother's mortality could have been averted. Whether that might have affected the future course of Buddhism is doubtful; for, the soothsayers supposedly foretold the Buddha would become an ascetic.

But they hedged it characteristically: Siddhartha could become a world-conquering monarch only if he were to be shielded from the Dukkhaof the human condition; an impossible condition, which led to one of the world's great religions.