Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.54

c8.54

Would this acute scholar have ventured it, had he had before him the old account of the occurrence under the tree which is composed solely of dogmatic elements such as the description of the four ecstasies and the threefold knowledge attained by Buddha? If he had been aware that Buddha and Mâra in the older texts do not fight under the tree, still less for the tree? That the only reference we hear of, made to the tree of knowledge, the supposed cloud-tree and ambrosia-tree, is this, that Buddha sat at its foot, when he fell into those trains of thought, which led him to the highest knowledge?* Where else sat in India in Buddha’s time, where else even down to our days do ascetics, who have no sheltering roof, and all vagrant folk, sit, but at the foot of a tree?† We are not comparative mythologists and we cannot forget that, besides these cloud-trees which are shattered by lightning or uprooted by the sun-dwarf, there grow other trees also on the earth, and we go so far as to surmise, that the trees, at the foot of which Gotama Buddha was wont to sit and meditate, belonged to this latter, much less deep-meaning but more widely extended, class of trees.