Banyan Tree Tattoo Meaning
Family, expansion, interconnection, and one life grown into a forest.
The Buddha sat under a fig tree and became enlightened. Then he walked to a banyan grove.
After the enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, the newly enlightened Siddhartha Gautama spent several weeks in contemplation before beginning to teach. One of those weeks was spent under a banyan tree — the Rajayatana tree, as the texts describe it — simply sitting with what had happened, before deciding what to do with it.
The banyan's structure made it the right tree for this: a single banyan is also a forest. The aerial roots drop from the branches and root themselves in the ground, becoming secondary trunks, which send out more branches, which drop more roots. The Great Banyan in Kolkata's botanical garden covers more than 3.5 acres and has over 3,000 aerial roots — it is classified as the world's widest tree. Its original trunk rotted away in 1925. The tree has been growing for over 250 years without its original center.
In Hindu tradition, the banyan is the tree of immortality — Vishnu is said to rest in its leaves during the great flood between creation cycles, the banyan being the only thing that persists when everything else is dissolved. The God who sleeps in the banyan's leaves is the God who will begin the world again when the flood recedes.
The banyan is worshipped as a deity in parts of India. Women tie threads around its trunks to pray for long life for their husbands. The tree that cannot be identified as one thing or many, that has no center anymore and continues regardless — this is the tree of the self that persists after the original form has dissolved.
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