/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-INDIA: Lotus Threatened Despite Religious Value

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Sep 19 2000 (IPS) - Airline pilots on the smog-obscured landing approach to the Indian capital, are grateful for the guidance provided by the shimmering giant white lotus.

They often point out the Lotus Temple, a famous Delhi landmark and tourist draw, to passengers as the most spectacular temple ever set up by the Bahai faith.

The symbolism is apt. For centuries, the lotus flower, commonly red or white, has served as guide to Asians, from Iran to Japan, seeking true spirituality that transcends religion.

When Bahai master-architect Fariburz Sahba designed and located the Lotus Temple in the spacious sixties, the skies over Delhi were clear and unpolluted, and he never intended his masterpiece to be an aviation landmark.

What Sahba was looking for was an icon that the Bahais could share with people of other faiths — no mean task considering that religion and religious totems are potentially explosive issues on the South Asian sub-continent.

During his researches, Sahba found many Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred symbols, which had penetrated other religions, such as Islam. “One of these symbols is the sacred flower of the Indians, the lotus,” Sahba wrote, arguing in favour his design.

Sahba found ancient references to the water plant, not only in religion but in art and literature. Most significantly, it figured in creation myths in the ancient Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, which seemed consonant with scientific theories that propose an aquatic origin to life.

According to Guru Karunakara, spiritual master of the ‘Santhigiri Ashram’, located on India’s southern tip and dedicated to ‘darshans’, or divine visions of life and creation, the lotus flower is a clue to the curved shape and structure of the universe itself.

The ancient Hindu ‘Panchavimsa Brahmana’ text speaks of the lotus being born of the light of the astral constellations.

The lotus is also said to signify the deliverance of the soul from ignorance in the same manner that its seed germinates in the depths of murky ponds and then struggles toward sunlight, before finally blossoming with its leaves and blooms unattached to the water.

But it was Buddhism, which unlike Hinduism travelled across Asia, that gave the lotus motif, the kind of universal acceptance that inspired the Bahai creation in immaculate white Italian marble.

The Buddha is said to have attained ‘nirvana’, or ultimate liberation, while seated on a seat made of lotus leaves spread under a fig tree — a recurring theme in Buddhist sculpture and painting.

Tibetan ‘thankas’ or scroll paintings invariably depict the Buddha seated in meditation on a lotus flower, in what is familiar to the practitioners of ‘yoga’ — the ancient system of mind and body control — as the ‘padmasana’ or lotus posture.

The sacred ‘mantra’ or incantation of the Mahayana school of Tibetan Buddhism, ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’ is a salutation to the Buddha as the jewel in the lotus and borrows from the Hindu concept of the lotus bud as the primordial womb.

In the lotus ‘sutra’, popular in Japan, China and Korea as the ‘one Buddha doctrine,’ the lotus flower is used as an apt analogy to explain that the “cause is the cause of Buddhahood and the effect is the position of Buddhahood” because it both bears fruit and blooms at the same time.

But nowhere is the lotus venerated as in India, a fact not lost on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which successfully exploited Hindu symbols and sentiments to come to power. The lotus flower is the party’s election symbol.

Common Hindu names like Kamla and Padma for girls and Pankaj and Rajiv for boys are simply different words for the lotus, a flower, which is in great demand as a religious offering to Hindu deities.

As in China, the lotus is a valuable vegetable in India with every one of its many parts, from the rhizome roots to the stalks, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds, cooked in different forms and eaten.

The Rig Veda, dating back 5,000 years, extols the food value of the lotus. Ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of medicine, recommends its parts as rejuvenants and for fertility.

But the lotus is threatened by a shrinkage in India’s water bodies and wetlands and their infestation with weeds says Anil Goel, assistant director at the National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) at Lucknow, capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state. The rarer blue lotus is nearly extinct in India.

Goel points out that the lotus has gone extinct in Egypt despite the fact that it was once worshipped there as the sun god Horus. But lotus seeds retrieved from an Egyptian pyramidal tomb have been germinated.

The NBRI is collecting germplasm of lotus species from India and around the world for preservation and distribution to farmers. “We already have 35 Indian species and 25 more from countries like Japan, Thailand, Australia and the United States,” Goel said.

But Goel thinks it is also important to revive a genuine “lotus culture” among Indians by emphasising its religious and cultural associations or by simply sensitising them to the “stunning beauty of a pond full of mature blooms.”