Symbols of Reverence — Ritual & Devotion : Artwork 18

The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya is among the most significant trees in human religious history: it is the specific tree beneath which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment, and its descendants — propagated through cuttings taken over two and a half millennia — grow in Buddhist temples across Asia. In Buddhist textual tradition, the tree is not a passive backdrop to the enlightenment event. The Lalitavistara Sutra describes the tree as a witness — it bowed toward the future Buddha when he approached, and its heart-shaped peepal leaves trembled in the stillness at the moment of awakening. The tree and the meditator are not figure and setting; they are two aspects of the same event. The proportion of the figure to the tree in this piece is the right one not for compositional reasons but for theological ones: the tree is the larger presence, the witness, the one that was there first and will remain.