Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  Vishnu’s consort is also closely associated with the lotus. Known as Shri, Lakshmi and even Padma, one of the Sanskrit words for lotus, she appeared relatively late in Vedic scriptures in a hymn attached to a later version of the Rig Veda. But already she springs to life with her lotus credentials fully formed, praised as ‘lotus-born’, ‘lotus-coloured’, ‘lotus-thighed’, ‘lotus-eyed’, ‘abounding in lotuses’ and ‘decked with lotus garlands’. An archetypical mother goddess, bestower of health, long life, prosperity, fecundity and fame, she is almost invariably represented sitting or standing in a lotus flower and holding a lotus in each hand.

  However late this lotus goddess came to the Veda, she reigned supreme in the Indian subcontinent long before the strictly patriarchal Aryan warrior-herdsmen arrived from the north and displaced the highly developed civilization of the Indus Valley. At sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Punjab, which reached their peak about 2500 BCE, archaeology has unearthed a treasury of seals, inscriptions and objects of worship, including the phallus, representing the generative male energy of the universe, and a bare-breasted goddess with lotuses in her hair. After the Indus civilization collapsed, the ancient goddess lingered on, reappearing as Lajja Gauri or Aditi, a strange, lotus-headed deity who is always shown with her knees drawn up and her legs spread apart in the posture of birthing or sexual receptivity. From the second to the eleventh centuries, her cult spread across central India and stone statues proliferated; several icons of the goddess are still worshipped today.

  Lajja Gauri coexists with more spiritual lotuses in other texts sacred to Hindus, among them the early Upanisads, thought to date from the seventh or sixth centuries BCE, a century or so before Buddhism emerged as another of India’s great religions. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad, the visible appearance of the universal spirit, brahman, is likened to ‘a golden cloth, or white wool, or a red bug, or a flame, or a white lotus, or a sudden flash of lightning’. A man wishing to attain greatness is advised to collect every type of herb and fruit into a bowl, follow a ritual of offerings and incantations, then lie beside the fire with his head to the east. In the morning, he should worship the sun, saying, ‘You are the one lotus among the quarters! May I become the one lotus among men!’ And when the woman he has created is about to give birth, he should sprinkle her with water and repeat these words:

  As from all sides the wind churns a lotus pond,

  so may your foetus stir and

  come out with the afterbirth.

  In another pre-Buddhist Upanisad, the Chandogya Upanisad, the lotus appears as the meditative centre, the space within the heart that contains all things.

  Now, here in this fort of brahman there is a small lotus, a dwelling-place, and within it, a small space. In that space there is something – and that’s what you should try to discover, that’s what you should seek to perceive . . .

  As vast as the space here around us is this space within the heart, and within it are contained both the earth and the sky, both fire and wind, both the sun and the moon, both lightning and stars. What belongs here to this space around us, as well as what does not – all that is contained within it.

  This same lotus would soon blossom into the central metaphor of Buddhism, which developed out of the teachings of the historical Buddha, Prince Siddharta Gautama, who lived and taught in the sixth or fifth centuries BCE. According to Buddhism’s basic philosophy, we are trapped in a cycle of suffering and rebirth caused by craving and an attachment to self. The path to enlightenment involves breaking this cycle by denying the self and the material world, aided by enlightened beings known as Bodhisattvas, whose compassion has led them to help all sentient beings towards enlightenment.

  Whereas the blue Nile lotus gained its power from its intimations of rebirth and transformation, and its connection to the sun god Ra, the Buddhist lotus speaks of purity and spiritual growth. Each culture has fashioned the flower in its own image, but each has looked closely at the real flower, developing metaphors that express and reflect its nature. Putting down roots deep into the slime of lake beds, the day-blooming Nelumbo nucifera flourishes in muddy water that is often disturbed by sheltering wildlife, yet it thrusts its leaves and then its buds high above the surface, where they open into supremely scented pink flowers, pure and unsullied. The fragrance is especially strong on the first and second days.

  Living lotuses are absent from the sacred garden of Lumbini in Nepal, which commemorates the birthplace of Prince Siddharta, but legend links them to his birth and early childhood, as told in the fantastical biography of the Buddha, the Lalavistara, written originally in Sanskrit and later translated into Chinese and Tibetan. The Buddha’s birth is foretold in a dream recounted by his mother, Queen Maya, to her husband, King Suddhodhana of Kapilvattu in the Himalayan foothills. In the dream, a noble white elephant entered her belly (in one commentary, bearing a white lotus in its trunk). On the night the Buddha-to-be entered the womb of his mother, ‘a stalk arose from the water below the earth, and, penetrating through sixty-eight hundreds of thousands of yojanas3 of the great earth, bore a lotus high up in the region of Brahmá.’ More lotuses attended the Buddha’s miraculous birth, appearing as he alighted on earth and as he made his first steps, ‘and where he set his foot there sprouted forth lotuses’.

  In Buddhist iconography, the lotus is one of eight auspicious symbols, and every important deity is shown sitting on a lotus, standing on a lotus, or holding a lotus in each or either hand in the form known as Padmapani, the lotus bearer. Some paintings and figurines combine all three poses, as in a tiny bronze statuette of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, from eastern India, who sits in an open lotus flanked by two more, one held loosely in his left hand while his right foot rests on another small lotus attached to the statue’s rim. Tibetan art similarly teems with lotuses, floating above the muddy waters of attachment to signify the primordial purity of body, speech and mind. In Tibetan Buddhism, the colour of the lotus is also significant: the white lotus represents spiritual purity; red is the lotus of love, compassion, passion, and all qualities of the heart; blue signifies the victory of the spirit over the senses; while the pink lotus reigns supreme and is generally reserved for the highest deity.

  AS LOTUSES WERE indigenous to China, the country had no need to wait for Buddhism’s arrival in the first century (some scholars place it much earlier) to recognize their beauty. The lotus was in any case revered by the old philosophical and ethical traditions of Taoism and Confucianism. It was the flower beloved by He Xiangu (Ho Hsien-ku), the only woman among Taoism’s Eight Immortals who is commemorated by the tai chi movement, ‘The fair lady works the shuttles’; and it stood as the model for the ‘superior man’ in Confucian thought – a reputation that continued well into the twentieth century. Before China’s revolution, every schoolchild was expected to memorize these lines by the celebrated eleventh-century philosopher and cosmologist, Zhou Dunyi (Chou Tun-i):

  [The lotus] emerges from muddy dirt but is not contaminated; it reposes modestly above the clear water; hollow inside and straight outside, its stems do not struggle or branch. Its subtle perfume pervades the air far and wide. Resting there with its radiant purity, the lotus is something to be appreciated from a distance, not profaned by intimate approach.

  The lotus appears often in Chinese poetry, for example in the (imaginary) pleasure gardens of a poem from the southern state of Ch’u, written some time around the fourth century BCE. In the poem, lotuses belong to the pleasures of nature and of life, which the shamans hope will tempt a dying king’s soul to return to his body, together with the light-footed princesses who wait for him in his garden pavilion, where the galleries catch the scent of orchids on the breeze and the view looks down on a winding pool. ‘Its lotuses have just opened; among them grow water chestnuts, and purple-stemmed water-mallows enamel the green wave’s surface.’

  The tone is wistful, as in much early Chinese poetry, evoking the beauties of nature without comment. Nature goes its ow
n way; man alone changes and suffers. In ‘Plucking Willows’ by Xiao Yi (Hsiao I), written during the chaotic northern dynasties of the fifth and sixth centuries, the sight of a weeping willow reminds the traveller of his home and his beloved, and of the willow branch he received on parting. But the willow that ‘joins hearts together’ also breaks like a heart – a play on the homonym for ‘lien’, ‘lotus’, which sounds like the word to sympathize, or to love.

  The mountain is as charming as lotus blossoms,

  The flowing water glitters like the bright moon.

  In the cold night, the gibbons’ cries pierce his heart;

  The wanderer’s tears soak his clothes.

  Yet for all nature’s changelessness in poetry, the lotus is responsible for one of the great seasonal transformations in Chinese gardens: it is ‘the flower of summer lassitude, just as the peony is the flower of early summer plenty’. Winter skating lakes turn in summer into ‘vast seas of lotus, over which pass strange and baffling blue-green shadows when breezes stir the great cupped leaves’. On a visit to Beijing’s lakes in the 1930s, the American garden writer Loraine Kuck was entranced. ‘To cross this jungle of water plants,’ she wrote, ‘a small boat must wind through dim green waterways which have been purposely kept clear, or the boat could not move at all. It is quite impossible to see out over the forest of tall leaves and stems on either side.’ In the old China, every home with a courtyard had one or two large porcelain bowls filled in season with exquisite lotus flowers, ‘bringing to the mind of the beholder all the thoughts of exaltation of which this flower is emblematic’.

  Although plants rarely featured in Chinese ornament before the First Emperor unified China in 221 BCE, the lotus gradually spread into every corner of Chinese life and art, ‘painted on porcelain, carved in jade, ivory, wood or stone, cast in bronze, embroidered on silk, and in a highly conventionalized form . . . a very common motif in the decorative borders of wooden or lacquered panels’. Enhanced by the prestige of Buddhism, lotus petals were used to decorate Chinese ceramics, and for a time during the Northern Song dynasty (960– 1127 CE) and again in the fourteenth century, the lotus displaced the peony as a central motif in porcelain decoration. In textile art, the peony and again the chrysanthemum took precedence, except during the Ming dynasty, when the lotus outshone them. At about the same time, the stylized motif of the lotus palmette, thought to have originated in the seventh century BCE in the carved stone floor panels and coverings of the Assyrian royal palaces of Nimrud and Nineveh, travelled back from China with the Mughals to the great carpet-making centres of Persia, reappearing in the ‘Shah ‘Abbasi palmettes’, named after Persia’s great Safavid ruler of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The lotus’s travels clearly illustrate how flowers are carried from continent to continent by conquest and migration, undergoing subtle transformations as they adapt to new cultures and civilizations.

  A much darker sign of the lotus’s emblematic influence can be seen in the ancient custom of footbinding, prevalent in China from the twelfth century and eradicated only in the twentieth, which sought to constrict women’s feet from girlhood into tiny ‘golden lotuses’, considered a sign of affluence and erotic appeal. The American historian Howard S. Levy has traced the practice to the dynastic rule of the sovereign-poet Li Yü, who controlled part of a divided China towards the end of the tenth century. Li Yü’s favourite concubine was a gifted dancer named Lovely Maiden, for whom he had built a six-foot-high golden lotus with a carmine carpel at its heart. Instructed to bind her feet with white silk cloth, which turned her toes into the points of a sickle moon, Lovely Maiden then danced in the centre of the lotus, ‘whirling about like a rising cloud’. As Lovely Maiden was still able to dance, her bindings cannot have been too constricting, but after the practice spread slowly southwards into the rest of China, they became ever more severe, and women’s distorted feet ever smaller. Songs, poems and plays of China in the Mongol era refer to ‘lotus blossom’ feet of just three inches.

  IT IS HARD to equate the lotus of female containment with the gentler mantra of eastern meditation, the jewel in the heart of the lotus, om mani padme hum, which travelled westwards alongside a more general interest in eastern religions, resurfacing in the work of Carl Jung, one of the twentieth century’s great pioneers of psychoanalysis. Jung provided a foreword to the sinologist Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, which contains a guide to meditation that was originally transmitted orally and later written down by a monk from the monastery of the Double Lotus Flower in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui. This lotus, too, unlocks the shimmering heart of the meditative experience: ‘The thousand-petalled lotus flower opens, transformed through breath-energy. Because of the crystallization of the spirit, a hundred-fold splendour shines forth.’

  For Jung, the ‘Golden Flower’ of ancient Chinese thought was a mandala symbol representing the universe, one he likened to drawings brought to him by his patients in the form of a geometric ornament, like a lotus-rosette, or a blossom growing from a plant. While he would increasingly visualize the mandala symbol as the rose of a Christianized western tradition (see Chapter 5), he recognized its roots in the eastern lotus. As he said in Psychology and Alchemy,

  The centre of the mandala corresponds to the calyx of the Indian lotus, seat and birthplace of the gods. This is called the padma, and has a feminine significance. In alchemy the vas [the alchemical vessel] is often understood as the uterus where the ‘child’ is gestated. In the Litany of Loreto, Mary is spoken of three times as the ‘vas’ (‘vas spirituale,’ ‘honorabile,’ and ‘insigne devotionis’) and in medieval poetry she is called the ‘flower of the sea’ which shelters the Christ.

  Another remarkable lotus survives in popular culture, Avatar’s Order of the White Lotus in the popular animated television series developed in the United States, which traces its ancestry back through the martial arts monk-heroes of the Shaolin monastery in Hunan to Buddhism’s White Lotus Society, forced underground when the Mongols took control of China in the late thirteenth century. The lotus may focus minds on the still centre of the turning world but it can also foment rebellion and change, or transform itself into a highly innovative racing and sports car marque, such is the power of its accumulated associations.

  IN THE EARLY twentieth century, one of the best places to view the lotus was undoubtedly Japan in the damp hot days of August, when the cicadas sang from earliest dawn and the true lotus lover got very little sleep, anxious to hear the buds open ‘with the sudden touch of dawn’. Enthusiastic portraits of the opening lotus come to us from the well-travelled Du Cane sisters in a book about the flowers and gardens of Japan, its watercolours by Ella and breathy descriptions by Florence, who wrote of the great buds opening with a noise that was ‘indescribable to one who has not heard it’, noting

  how quickly the delicate pink or white petals unfurl, as though hastening to make the most of their short life, for before the overpowering heat of the August noonday the flower closes, to open once more on the morrow and then die a graceful death; the petals dropping one by one, but still retaining all the freshness of their colour, and then nothing will be left but the great seed pod, very beautiful in itself, but not as beautiful as the great bluish-green leaves studded with dewdrops, which seem to reflect every passing cloud.

  Although not generally considered a Japanese native, the lotus had arrived early in Japan – perhaps as early as 2000 BCE, along with apricots and flowering peaches. More lotuses came with Buddhism around the mid-sixth century, and records tell of a lotus festival borrowed from the Chinese and celebrated by the aristocrats of Nara in the Heian period (794–1192 CE). The number of lotus varieties was also steadily increasing, from twenty-two in 1688 to thirty a little over a century later, reaching almost a hundred by the mid-nineteenth century. Most parts of the lotus were popular as food, and the leaves used to wrap other foods as well; by extension, a ‘lotus leaf’ came to me
an a fickle woman. The lotus was also prized by the samurai class and by connoisseurs, so that by the late Edo period Japan had overtaken China in the number of ornamental varieties grown.

  Later chapters in this book tell the story of how Japan – a relatively closed society – was forced to open its doors to the West, starting with the mission in 1853 of the American navy’s Commodore Matthew Perry. But while the lotus’s popularity within Japan began to wane in the sweeping changes of the Meiji Restoration, the lotus caught the eye of western visitors who had come to help modernize Japanese society, or simply to admire its exotic otherness. In a curious convergence of our eastern and Egyptian lotuses, the designer Christopher Dresser marvelled in the early 1880s at the many echoes of ancient Egypt he detected in Japan’s art, architecture and artefacts. Singling out the carved stem and flower of a Buddhist lotus on the altar of a Tokyo temple, he discovered in its rigidity ‘that simplicity, yet dignity, in its treatment, and that stern conventionality in the drawing of the flower, which would almost lead us to believe that it was produced under the Pharaohs’. He marvelled, too, at the Japanese love of flowers, especially those that required you to look upwards, such as flowering cherries. For Dresser, the almond reigned as the flower of spring, the lotus as the flower of summer, and the chrysanthemum – Japan’s imperial flower, which bears the same relation to Japan as the rose does to England – as the flower of autumn.

  Another westerner who wrote admiringly of Japan was the young British architect Josiah Conder, hired in the 1870s by the Meiji government to help modernize its architecture. Conder’s books fanned a craze in the West for Japanese gardens, which used few flowers beyond marginal plantings of flag and other irises by streams and marshy beds, summer lotuses grown in some garden lakes, and a few choice flowers and grasses of late summer. Conder is remembered as one of the first westerners to write about the art of Japanese flower arranging, in which the lotus was among the featured flowers of summer, although its spiritual and religious associations precluded its use on more secular festive occasions.