Plants: Borderline beings in Indian traditions

Jun 13, 2009, 08.00am IST
Ellison Banks Findly.

Classical admonitions to "do no harm" lead us to early Jain renunciates who must refuse foods that contain living seeds, sprouts, or mildews.

They also lead us to Buddhist monks who must refrain from walking in the rainy season so as not harm living beings in the soil underfoot. And they lead us, finally, to Hindu requests for forgiveness from trees about to be cut, hoping that the injury may be minimal...

In a world view shared by all three traditions, plants are seen as full participants in the ongoing flux of life, of enlivened energy and matter that includes animals and humans. This world view is uniform across traditions, and posits five elements for including plants in the living matrix of the cosmos.

Plants are "living" because they grow, because they are involved in the cosmic cycle of moving water, and because they breathe. Plants are "sentient", having only the one sense of touch the base for all other senses and the sense that does not die with the physical body but continues unbroken with karmic consciousness through rebirth.

Plants are "stable", enduring an anchored, rooted life unlike their mobile sentient colleagues. Plants feel "pleasure and pain" just as humans do, and show their experience of pleasure by turning towards the sun and flourishing, and their experience of pain by withering when cut and eventually dying.

Finally, plants are "karmic", enmeshed in the process of rebirth and conditioned therefore by the three gunas. Being one-sensed and the lowest of living beings, plants are classified as tamasic, indicated by laziness, inertia, inattention, dullness and delusion. Although tamasic at one extreme, plants also appear as "borderline beings" at the other extreme. As models for ascetic behaviour, plants are guides for the highest realm of sattvic life. Ascetics are admonished to be stable in body and mind; full of equanimity and tranquillity; flexible like trees in the wind; undistracted by annoying pests; and ready with compassionate service for humans, providing shade, lodging and food.

Jainism was the earliest to focus on ahimsa, and has the fullest application of non-violence to daily life... Renunciates, for example, cannot accept food that might still be living, and contemporary lay Jains are precluded from eating vegetables taken from the earth like potatoes, onion and carrots, that may have vegetation hidden in the folds of flowering tops like broccoli and cauliflower, or that may contain living beings (like honey).

In Hinduism, the practice of plant ahimsa extends into public spaces, with instruction on treating plant diseases, directions for planting trees and injunctions for rituals to ensure both the internal and external flourishing of plants...

In Buddhism, an interesting conundrum occurs. Early on, lay donors wanted to give only to ascetics of the very highest behaviour, that is, to those who practised full non-violence to animals, humans and plants. In time, when Buddhist donors themselves wanted to practise non-violence, they were stymied because, as lay people, they needed to cut plants for housing, transportation and eating purposes. In order to alleviate this dilemma, plants were determined to be non-living, thus allowing lay people to follow ahimsa.

The fullness of plant life puts plants in reciprocal relationship with humans. According to Hindu folklore, humans and plants can converse and marry. These possibilities bestow on humans the unique responsibility for nurturing and protecting plants; a responsibility that ensures that plant life remains a diverse, healthy and flourishing component of the world's harmonious balance.

Extracted from the writer's Plant Lives: Borderline Beings in Indian Traditions.