Bodhi Tree of Bodh Gaya and Me

I visited Bodh Gaya, Bihar for a business meeting in April 2016 and was lucky to get a chance to visit the Bodh Gaya Temple.

World heritage site, ‘Bodh Gaya’, the place where under a Peepal Tree, Siddhartha found all his answers and discovered his life story after wandering from Lumbini, in Nepal to Himalayas to plains of North India to Gaya in Bihar.

The guide, who we hired to give us information about the holy place, took us to the very place where the Bodhi Tree is.

Its a huge tree with green leaves, fenced with wall, painted golden and surrounded by Buddhist monks, meditating and offering, chanting their prayers, local doing their own jobs, that is their every day life, a lot of squirrels and birds live on that tree.

The guide was explaining things to me and some how I got disconnected and started looking at the top of the tree.

All of a sudden I end up asking this question, "Dear Tree, You gave/helped Gautam Buddha a reason and purpose and answers to questions he had, but What is your life story?"

Now, this might sound funny and made up but this actually happened, a new light green leaf fell down from the tree. I saw it, I felt like picking it, but I did not, I was thinking a lot, a lady monk dressed in white, maybe from Thailand/Vietnam, picked up the leaf, went to the tree wall, bowed down, prayed and then approached towards an old monk, who was sitting next to me which I realized after she walked to him, just few steps from the tree and gave that leaf to the monk, joinded hands, did Namaskar and she walked away.'

Now after all this happened, I suddenly felt the tree spoke to me, which was of course my conscience/hallucination or whatever you want to call it. The mighty tree said, “Giving is my Life Story, not getting attached to anything and taking back nothing with me is my life story".

Because, I saw the lady monk, picking up the only leaf which fell, from the tree in the span of 15 or 20 minutes of me sitting there, she might have taken it with her, may be considering, blessings as it is a holy tree, but she offered the leaf to the old monk sitting there, I think the tree spoke to me and answered me with this demonstration.

I don’t know, how connected/disconnected my writing is, did I convey the message or not but, this is what I felt and I wrote to tell this story.

However, I feel, I got an answer, "Giving and not keeping or taking anything is the life story of the holy tree at Bodh Gaya"

Today is Buddha Purnima and I thought I should share this story with you all.

(the image attached is not from the premises of the temple, where Bodhi Tree is, photography is prohibited in the temple. This is from a near by tourist garden.)