Siva’s Flora

The paper excerpted below was written in May this year by Soham Kacker [University of Oxford] and myself, and illustrated beautifully by Chippy Diac Vivekanandah [Studio Bristletoe]–for the 2024 Oxford Food Symposium on “Gardens, Flowers, and Fruit.” Our session itself happens online on July 19, 4pm BST, in case this teaser tempts you all enough to get (admittedly somewhat pricey) tickets and join the conversation.

I believe I speak for both my co-authors when I say that this was perhaps the happiest, even most joyous, piece of writing & creating we ever did. And for me, it was preparation for a visit to Kedarnath and Badrinath in the Garhwal Himalaya, where I met the very daruka trees that create one of the most profound settings for Siva’s dance, rudraksha, and more. That was a yatra, not an ethnobotanical foray–but still, the cycle was complete.

1. Kuśasthalī, or the forest in time

NAture as botanical material, constituted of plants, flowers, leaves, trees, whole gardens or entire forests, plays an abundant role in Hindu narrative and worship traditions—but is rarely the focus of specific scholarly attention. Attending to that gap, this essay seeks Śiva’s garden or, more accurately, a botanical landscape in which to place Śiva, because forests, plants, and flowers can be called upon to present particular views of Śaiva or Śiva-centric cosmology. Śiva takes many colourful forms in Hindu stories: he is the wild and fierce Rudra who glows in fire-reds; the great mountain-dwelling ascetic, white and pure; the blue-throated swallower of poisons; the compassionate and beautiful God bedecked with garlands of golden yellow karnikā. What if botanical stories and insights from Śaiva texts could be gathered—what would gardens grown of those plants look like? And what might these tell of Śaiva ways of knowing and being?

No sooner had we posed the question than we found ourselves in a forest. Methodologically, this was simply the immense and dense thicket of Saiva texts through which we now needed to chart a course. Śaiva literature is comprised of a vast number of works of varying length and complexity, accrued over centuries from different parts of the country, encompassing several lay and initiate traditions, and including devotional expressions as much as doctrinal and practical exegeses. We have tended to rely less on texts expounding Śaiva philosophies and more on literary, devotional, and practice-oriented sources, as it is largely there that engagements with the plant world gain importance. We draw mostly from Purāṇic sources, rich in story and mythology, and on Mantramārga [‘the path of mantras’] sources within initiate traditions, particularly Śaiva Siddhānta [‘the conclusive truth about Śiva’] and (generally South Indian) devotionalism, as each has shaped what we could call ‘everyday Śaivism’ and each contains, as we read it, a garden. We also reference Vedic and other ascetic traditions were pertinent.

The real forests, Śiva’s forests, appear within these texts and story traditions sometimes as a backdrop for a divine pageant, sometimes as though part of the cast therein, sometimes as both. In that last category is Kuśasthalī, an exceptionally heavenly forest, rich in variety and bloom, in which white nāga flowers are studded with bees as though they were black pupils in white eyes, yūthika creepers rise up “fanning flower-laden branches,” trees and creepers are entwined in lovers’ embraces or bent over by the weight of flowers and fruits as though in gracious offering, shining Arjuna trees stand as “excellent men” draped in white silk garments, tilaka and aśoka are a noble gathering “exchanging friendly gifts” [SkP vol 12, 5.5-36]. Each leaf, flower and filament is alive, touching, communing, dancing, rising. The forest reverberates with birdsong. Into this sylvan grove enters Śiva with his kapāla: the ash-smeared ascetic-mendicant with a skull as his eternal begging bowl. He enjoys the trees who bow to him, offer obeisances, and ask Him to be present in this forest for all time. Śiva replies that he will indeed be present but the trees may go anywhere, assume any form, and always yield fruit. So saying, Śiva stands in Kuśasthalī for a thousand years and the forest becomes the Mahākālavaṉa: the great forest beyond time and death.

But then he places the kapāla down, and the three worlds shake. Trembling devas and asuras approach Brahma, who instructs them to find refuge in Śiva in the Mahākālavaṉa. When they approach this splendid forest with shining bowers, however, so certain of Śiva’s presence there—He is nowhere to be seen. Śiva “cannot be seen by one who is not properly initiated,” Brahma reminds them; once they are in constant communion with him, he will “know the proper time” [SkP vol 12, 5.49-72, 6.1-14].

There are other, prior extolments of Śiva as “Lord of forests,” for instance in the Śatarudriya and the Śri Rudram-Nāmakam of the Ṛg and Yajur Vedas respectively, which enumerate the epithets of Rudra lengthily. The Mahākālavaṉa episode stands out for its detailed and lyrical descriptions of how this botanical association came to be and for its placement of Śiva’s forest as beyond time. Time in Śaiva texts is itself neither linear nor historicist, and the mingling and melding of ideas and practices across different schools equally have the effect of collapsing centuries or transcending them. We therefore regard the ‘forest in time’ as constituted by a series of moments, the ‘when’ of which are best known only to Śiva himself.

The Kannada poet of the Vīraśaiva tradition Allama Prabhu offers a riddle of sorts, illuminating this thought:

Were was the mango tree,
where the koilbird?

when were they kin?

Mountain gooseberry
and sea salt:
              when
were they kin?

And when was I
kin to the Lord
of Caves? (trans. Ramanujan 1973: 149)[1]

Spring is when the koel and mango are kin; the bird feasts so eagerly on tender mango blossoms that the poet Kālidāsa imagines that its voice must become clear only after it has done so [Kumārasambhavā, 1.14]. Gooseberries and sea salt become kin in summer pickling jars—and Śiva alone knows the appropriate moment when he should appear, always in the forest for the forest is where Śiva is, to make kin of those who seek him. This essay finds five such landscapes and five such moments of “kinship,” waiting, yearning, searching, propitiating, speaking of and speaking to Śiva. Flowers, leaves, plants, and trees become metaphors, media, and means to invoke and discern his presence or determine the import of his emergence.

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[1] ettaNa maamara ettaNa kOgile ettaNiMdetta saMbaaMdhavayyaa?
beTTada nellikaayi samudradoLagaNa uppu ettaNiMdetta saMbaMdhavayyaa?
guhEshvara liMgakkeyU enageyU ettaNiMdetta saMbaMdhavayyaa?

2. Dārukāvana, or the forest of transformations

MAnifesting eternally in Kuśasthalī, Śiva only ever visits Dārukāvana or the forest of pines [Cedrus deodara]. The Himalayan devdaru forest is a “place of passage” (Kramrisch 1981: 292), perhaps also of sport. But of what kind?

[…]

3. Puśpāraṇya, or the forest of prayers

ŚIva in the forest is constantly changing, transforming, leaving the seeker with an unpredictable deity who may assume the terrible form of Bhairavā, the compassionate Natarajā, the unmarked Bhikṣāṭana or the formless mūla liṅga of bamboo shoots and mangrove roots. Which Śiva will seekers find? Alongside such wild forest uncertainties simultaneously grew a Purāṇic and Āgamic garden, in which flowers, fruits, and select botanical offerings become media by which the devoted may commune with Śiva, and invoke his particular forms with greater certainty. Maintaining a flower garden becomes an aspect of kārya, worship using the gross physical.[1] Then from the sylvan witness and symbol of constant transformation, plants as offerings become active agents of invocation—so that via “offerings of leaves, flowers, and in particular karavīra flowers, he [Śiva] becomes the bestower of boons” (SkP vol 1, 5.89).

[…]

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[1] kārya, kriya, yoga, gñāna are the four paths held by the Śaiva Siddhāntins in such texts as the Sivaprakāsam and the Śivagñāna Siddhiyār Supakkam of Aruṇanti Śivācāriyar.

4. Bilvākṣaraṇya, or the forest of devotion

VArious everyday Śaiva traditions of worship have adapted botanical myths and practices from the Purāṇas and Āgamas and turned them into defining devotional practices, premised on the notion that certain plants have arisen from Śiva himself. When Mahādeviakka declares to Śiva, “You are the forest,” her words pithily summarize Dakśa in the Vāyupurāṇa as he elegises Śiva in his botanical element: “You are the creeper, the winding plants, the grass, the medicinal herbs; you are the animals, beasts and birds; you are the beginning of substance, activity and attributes; you are the bestower of flowers and fruits” (VP Vol 1, 30.238). In such articulations, plants offer a language of devotionalism beyond ritual forms. Two plants speak best to the variable character of this adoration: rudrākṣa and bilva.

[…]

5. Vistaravaṉa, or the spreading forest

YAkśas are the fierce beings who dwell in the roots of trees, tutelary gods of the natural world—but the yakśaswarūpa is Śiva’s alone, as though to remind that aspects of Rudra endure in the body of a deity now made accessible by devotion. Just as Śiva flouts convention, finding not defilement but the greatest purity in burning grounds, turning ash into the water in which Pāśupata ascetics must bathe in Atimārga traditions—so also does the “wild and incorrigible [devotee], unquenchable in his yearning” (Subramanian 2014: 9) challenge the advantages of wealth and position to turn his body into a temple and offer single leaves and favourite flowers without ritual or ceremony in the Mantramārga. Yet, the procedural conventions put in place by the Āgamas and the dharmaśāstra ideas elaborated by texts of the Śivadharma corpus (cf. Kafle 2021: 240), work in tandem with Purāṇic, folk and bhakti traditions to pull ideas into devotional contexts, creating wide interpretive latitude.

[…]

Glossary of plants

	Sanskrit Name	Botanical Name		Sanskrit Name	Botanical Name
1	Agastya	Sesbania grandiflora	20	Kurumpala	Artocarpus heterohyllus
2	Arjuna	Terminalia arjuna	21	Kutaja	Wrightia antidysenterica
3	Arka/Arkapuśpa	Calotropis gigantea	22	Mallikā	Jasminum sambac
4	Aśoka	Saraca asoca	23	Mandāra	Erythrina variegata
5	Baka	Barleria cristata	24	Mogaraka	Jasminum sambac (var.)
6	Bakula	Mimusops elengi	25	Nāga	Calophyllum inophyllum
7	Bandhūka	Pentapetes phoenicea	26	Nāgakesara	Messua ferrea
8	Bilva	Aegle marmelos	27	Nāgalingapuśpam	Couroupita guianensis
9	Devadāru	Cedrus deodara	28	Nellikaya	Phyllanthus emblica
10	Dhatūrā	Datura stramonium	29	Nirgundī	Vitex negundo
11	Droṇapuṣpī	Leucas aspera	30	Palāśa	Butea monosperma
12	Jāmun	Syzygium cumini	31	Punnāga	Calophyllum inophyllum
13	Jāpa	Hibiscus rosa-chinensis	32	Rudrākśa	Elaeaocarpus angustifolius
14	Jatī	Jasminum grandiflorum	33	Thillai	Excoecaria agallocha
15	Karavīra	Nerium oleander	34	Tilaka	Wendlandia heynei
16	Karnikā/Karnikāra	Cassia fistula	35	Tulasī	Ocimum tenuiflorum
17	Kausumbha	Carthamus tinctorius	36	Vata	Ficus benghelensis
18	Ketakī	Pandanus odoratissimus	37	Yūthika	Jasminum auriculatum
19	Koṉṟai	Cassia fistula

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