Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/158

136 of prayer wait until a miraculous leaf detaches itself and flutters down. It seemed sacrilege when the Brahman snapped off a leaf and offered it to me with the universal Indian gesture of the begging palm, and, at a request for more, snatched off a whole handful of trembling green hearts, as ruthlessly and brainlessly as the troop of monkeys in the bo-tree at Anuradhpura had done a few weeks before.

Despite the reverently worded mantra with which his own people address the tree, this Brahman butcher, responsive to a single rupee, continued to snatch off and break away twig after twig until I had a great green bouquet of nearly one hundred living, quivering leaves of Buddhist prayer. With no seeming appreciation of the sacrilege, he said: "Some people are satisfied with just one leaf. They bow to it, pray to it, and carry it away in a gold box." Then he set himself down on the Vajrasana, the Diamond Throne, the Bodhi Manda, or Veranda of Knowledge, to yawn and scratch his lean arms as he adjusted his drapery.

Three centuries after the death of the Buddha the emperor Asoka, grandson of that Asoka who drove the Greeks from India and who ruled from Kabul to the sea, began a relentless persecution of Buddhists. He ordered the Sacred Bo-tree cut down and burned; but when two trees sprang uninjured from the flames and a priest emerged unharmed, the "raging Asoka" was humbled, converted. He built a wall around the tree, and marked the Great Teacher's seat by a carved stone altar