You can see it in almost any Sri Lankan temple. Its six pastel-pink petals and its strong, almost cloyingly sweet fragrance, are unmistakable. It is of course what Sinhalese people and indeed many others as well, call the sāl flower, the blossom most favoured by devotees to honour the Buddha with. The sāl tree and its flower played a minor, but interesting role in the Buddha’s life.
According to the Mahaparinibbāna Sutta, the longest sutta in the Tipitaka, when the Buddha arrived in Kusinārā at the end of his final journey, he lay down between two sāltrees. Suddenly, unexpectedly and even though it was not the flowering season, these trees burst into blossom and their pollen and petals sprinkled down over the Buddha. Amazed that even Mother Nature herself was paying respects to the Tathāgata, Venerable Ānanda exclaimed: “Lord, the very trees are giving homage to you.” The Buddha replied:
"Ānanda, these sāltrees burst into flower out of season in homage to the Tathāgata and covered his body. But the monk or the nun, the lay man or the lay woman who lives practicing the Dhamma properly and perfectly fulfils the Dhamma, …they honour, revere and respect the Tathāgata with the highest homage."
There is little doubt that this association with the Buddha’s parinibbāna helped make the sāl flower along with the lotus, Buddhism’s most popular flower. The sāl tree also serves as a prop for several Jātaka stories. The Rukkhadhamma Jātaka for example, uses the thickness of a sāl forest to illustrate the advantages of unity and togetherness. In this story, a king asked all the tree spirits to select for themselves a plant as their home. The Bodhisattva, who had been reborn as a tree spirit, advised his kinsmen to avoid trees that stood alone and pick one of those that grew close to others. Some did as he advised, making their homes in a thick sāl forest, but others moved into isolated trees growing near towns and villages thinking that they would receive offerings humans made to such trees. One day a furious storm swept over the country uprooting even the mightiest and most deeply rooted trees growing in the open. But the sāl trees in the forest, supported by each other and with their branches interlaced, withstood the storm.
But there is a fact about what is commonly called the sāl tree which may come as a surprise. The botanical name for what is widely thought to be the sāl is the couroupita guianensis, which translates as the “cannonball,” and is native to the coastal regions of Guyana and Brazil, not to India, Nepal or Sri Lanka. So, the cannonball tree cannot be the sāl tree mentioned in the scriptures. How this tree originally got from South America to tropical Asia is uncertain. Brazil was a Portuguese colony as was Sri Lanka in the 16th century, so it may have been introduced to the island by the Portuguese. On the other hand, at a later date, the British controlled both Guyana and Sri Lanka, so it might have been introduced by them. As the cannonball has no commercial value and the English colonialists were great garden lovers, they are a more likely candidate to have introduced the tree into Sri Lanka.
But how and why did the Sinhalese Buddhists mistake the cannonball for the real sāl tree? Again, this is uncertain. But if you gently lift the elongated hood-like stamen of the cannonball flower you will see a small creamy-white nodule underneath it which looks remarkably like a tiny stūpa. It seems likely that when Sinhala Buddhists first became familiar with the cannonball, they made an association between the sāl flower and the Buddha’s parinibbāna, represented by the stūpa, thus assuming that the cannonball tree must be the sāl. From Sri Lanka, the cannonball tree and its mistaken identity spread to the rest of Buddhist Asia. Today, the confusion between couroupita guianensis and shorea robusta is so pervasive that almost every contemporary depiction of the Buddha’s birth and parinibbāna will depict a cannonball tree rather than a sāl.
So, if the cannonball is not the real sāl, then what is? What is called sāl in English and Hindi, sāla in Pāḷi, and shorea robusta by botanists, is north India’s most well-known timber tree. Its small yellow flowers have a strong jasmine-like perfume and it has large leaves not unlike those of the teak tree. It can grow to a great size, up to 45 metres high with a girth of 3.6 metres, although specimens of this size are rare today outside state forests and national parks in India and the lowlands of Nepal. They are usually cut long before they reach their maximum size. Comparing the sāl with the cannonball the differences between them become immediately apparent. The former has yellow flowers which grow at the end of the branches, its wood is dense and hard, and it bears small green nuts. The cannonball tree’s flowers are pinkish-red, large and fleshy, and grow out of the trunk. Its timber is soft and porous and its nuts are large, round and brown, not unlike cannonballs, giving the tree its English name.
But how did it happen that the mix-up between these trees became so widespread, in fact almost universal? For example, until just recently, the Wikipedia article on the sāl tree showed only pictures of the cannonball tree flower. A beautifully illustrated book on the life of the Buddha for children published in Indonesia a few years back showed the Buddha passing away while being showered with – you guessed it – cannonball tree flowers. It’s a good question and I’ll suggest a possible reason. Many early scholars of Buddhism and converts to Theravada, were English and they often learned their Buddhism from Sri Lankan sources. Likewise, the first Theravadin monks in the West were Sri Lankans, which may be how the confusion spread.
Asian Buddhist pilgrims visiting India will see the real sāl trees in the park around the Mahāparinibbāna Temple in Kusinārā, but they are unlikely ever see any in their own countries. Being native to sub-tropical Northern India they do not grow well in tropical Asia. However, the former director of Sri Lanka’s Peradeniya Botanical Gardens informed me that at least one sāl tree is to be found in his country. During a state visit to Sri Lanka in 1980, Nepal’s King Birendra visited the gardens and planted a sāl tree, where it grows there to this day.
Knowing that the cannonball tree is not the sāl tree should not stop Buddhists from appreciating it and offering it in temples. The flower’s beautiful colour, form and fragrance make it particularly worthy of being offered to the “teacher of gods and humans, the Fully Awakened Buddha.”
Shravasti Dhammika