Some 25 centuries ago, on the morning of December 8th, by the Japanese Buddhist calendar, one Siddhartha Gotama Shakya, while sitting in meditation under a fig tree, woke up to the reality of life and the world.

This awaking to reality made him the Buddha Shakyamuni, the “Awakened One sage of the Shakyas”. The specific type of fig tree under which he sat became known as the Bodhi Tree, in good old Latin – ficus religiosa.

In the good old tradition of Tony Robbins, many people then imitated the Buddha’s successful actions and sat under a Bodhi Tree for hours on end, often falling asleep instead of waking up. One of the problems with sitting under THE Bodhi Tree was simple logistics – there is just finite space under one fig tree, even a special one.

So what to do?

The principle of homeopathy was adopted in that the essence of this tree could be passed on even in very high dilutions. So, the essence of this one tree in Bodhgaya, India, was taken, in the form of a leaf, and planted in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. A branch of that tree was then given to a Mary Foster to be planted in the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, Hawaii.

A branch from that tree was given to the University of  California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) and grew joyously in its botanical garden.

Now the camera zooms in on Max, who was, about a dozen years ago, in charge of part of UCLA’s computer systems, and who enjoyed his lunch break in that very UCLA botanical garden. This is how one little branch of that 4th generation bodhi tree ended up in a glass of water in your’s truly house – with the plan for this branch to sprout some roots so that it could be planted and supply the space – in some twenty or thirty years – to meditate under, in order to finally awake.

It was a very difficult birth and early childhood for this fifth generation of bodhi tree indeed. Only with the greatest care was there finally a five-inch baby tree growing in a planter – only to be used by painters as a weight for their tarp when slapping paint on the house. The poor baby tree was beaten up, splattered with paint and almost died.

I nearly gave up there, but started one last attempt, and this attempt coincided with the birth of our son Zen, who apparently chose his name because he had none of it and it was the goal of this life to gain some – Zen, I mean.

Surprisingly, growing up together, Zen and the bodhi tree, worked like a charm and after two years the tree had already surpassed the child as the picture above shows. The gap in size increased over the years, and ten years later, the child grew to a bit over five feet, while the tree rose to at least twenty.

I now have doubts that I will ever sit under this tree to suddenly awake, as the house might have to find a different owner, and this tree can certainly not be transplanted. We also learned that by the type of Buddhism practiced in Thailand, we made a mistake in planting this tree in our yard – these trees are reserved for temples and monks! But we did some ceremony/exorcism so smooth the waves. The tree is now wearing some colorful clothes around its trunk, and all is OK.

PS: Now, fifteen years later, the house is in new hands after long and trying times. Sadly, the bodhi tree did not make it through these troubling times – maybe the Buddhists with a Thai characteristic were right, and a residential home is not the place for a bodhi tree.