A Meditation on Trees and Krishna

Naughty Krishna holding a piece of candy

Poems are made by fools like  me
But only God can  make a  tree
(Joyce Kilmer)

I came across these lines on the internet the other day. So God makes the trees? Well he does, doesn’t he?

Hmm. Maybe Kilmer was on to something.  After all, I had always taken trees for granted.

So I began to wonder about trees and  Krishna. And I even learned something about the planets.

(By the way, does the name Joyce sound feminine to your ear? But it  belonged to a handsome young American man, a prolific poet.  He died in France at the age of thirty-one fighting in World War I.)

But getting back to God making trees, my thoughts turned to a narrative about the great devotee Narada Muni. He never stops moving, going here and there in the material and spiritual worlds. He has no restrictions.

He carries his veena, a stringed instrument, to play while he constantly sings the names of the Lord.

When Will I Be Saved?

One day,  as Narada was about to set off for the spiritual world, he met a brahmana priest. “Are you going to meet the Lord?” asked the brahmana. “Will you please ask him when I will get my salvation.”

“All right,” said Narada. “I will ask Him”

As Narada went on his way, playing his veena and singing Krishna’s names, he met a cobbler  sitting under a large banyan tree mending shoes. “Are you are going to see God?” asked the cobbler. “Will you please ask him when my salvation will come.”

When Narada Muni arrived in the spiritual Vaikuntha planets, he  asked Narayana, the Lord, about the brahmana and the cobbler.

“The cobbler will come here to me when he leaves his present body,” said Narayana.

“What about the brahmana?” Narada asked.

“He will have to remain there for many births,” said Narayana. “I do not even know when he will come.”

“What?” thought Narada.“How can this happen? How can a cobbler attain liberation before a brahmana?”

He turned to the Lord.  “I can’t understand this mystery,” he said.

Pulling an Elephant through the Eye of a Needle

“You will see,” said Narayana. “They will  ask what I was doing. Then tell them I was threading the eye of a needle with an elephant.”

Narada returned to earth and met the brahmana. “Have you seen the Lord?” asked the brahmana. “What was he doing?”

“He was threading an elephant through the eye of a needle,” said Narada.

“What nonsense!” said the brahmana “I don’t believe it.”

Narada understood:  The brahmana had no faith.  All he could do was read books.

Narada went on to meet the cobbler under the banyan tree. “Have you seen the Lord?” asked the cobbler. “Tell me, What was he doing?”

“He was threading an elephant through the eye of a needle,” Narada replied.

The cobbler began to weep. “Oh, my Lord is so wonderful,” he said through his tears. “He can do anything.”

“You mean you believe it?” asked Narada. “You believe the Lord can push an elephant through the eye of a needle?”

“Why not?” said the cobbler. “Of course I believe it.”

“How is that?”

“As I sit under this banyan tree,” said the cobbler, “I see figs fall from the branches every day. And each fig has many little seeds. And each seed contains  a banyan tree like this large, spacious tree we’re sitting under.

“This big spreading tree,  and it came out of a seed no bigger than a pinhead. So if the Lord can put such a big tree into a tiny seed, why can’t he thread an elephant through the eye of a needle?”

Srila Prabhupada on faith and trees… and planets:

So this is called faith. It is not a question of blindly believing. There is reason behind the belief. If Krishna can put large trees inside little seeds, is it so astounding that He is keeping all the planetary systems floating in space through His energy? (Raja Vidya)

Eavesdropping on the Bhagavad-Gita

And speaking of banyan trees, did you know that a banyan listened in when  Krishna spoke the Bhagavad-Gita?

Yes. It came as a surprise to me too. I already knew that as the Battle of Kurukshetra was about to begin, Krishna drove the chariot between the two armies. But I didn’t know  that he stopped  next to a banyan tree, where he spoke the Bhagavad-Gita to the distraught Arjuna.

Five thousand years later, the tree still stands at that spot, now known as Jyotisar, ‘The Essence of Light.’ And you can go there too.  Just take the train from Delhi to Kurukshetra, the same as I did.

And you can go into the town and visit the Birla temple with its white stone carving of the chariot pulled by horses while Arjuna and Krishna sit in their seats. And go inside and bow to the life-size carving of Arjuna kneeling while Krishna speaks the Bhagavad-Gita.

(I hope I got the details right. It’s been forty-seven years.)

The Little Boy and the Supreme Lord

Afterwards, you can walk over to the town center and visit the temple of Surya-Narayana, the sun god. Then  go next door to a temple not big enough to walk into and stand in the doorway to look at the big smiles on the faces of the little-boy devotee Dhruva Maharaja and the Supreme Lord, Narayana, as they face each other.

But the first stop should be the ISKCON  center there, which I have never seen.

Now let’s take the train back to Delhi and hop on a plane eastward all the way to  Jagannath Puri on the Bay of Bengal.

After we visit the ISKCON temple, we’ll walk a bit to see a miraculous tree called Siddha Bakula. “Siddha” means perfect, and the bakula tree’s English name is Spanish cherry or bulletwood. A tall evergreen, it produces fragrant flowers and edible fruit also used as medicine.

A Toothbrush for God

One day, the priests at the temple of Jagannatha offered a bakula twig to the Lord for a toothbrush.

“Wait!” you say. “A toothbrush for God? What could the Supreme Lord of all the universes ever want with a toothbrush? Toothbrushes are for creatures like us who have teeth and eat food.”

Ah, my friend, but aren’t you forgetting something? Krishna also has teeth, and Krishna also eats. Why not offer him the comfort of a toothbrush? It’s the least we can do.

Later, the priests gave the bakula toothbrush to Lord Chaitanya as prasad or mercy. Temple priests give objects like clothes or toothbrushes used by Krishna to devotees as prasad to use or worship or even eat.  Yes, devotees also eat prasad, foodstuffs previously offered to Krishna.

And when you go to Jagannath Puri, don’t forget to feast on some of Lord Jagannatha’s prasad. You may have to pay someone a few rupees to get it for you, though, as only native-born Hindus may enter the temple.

Lord Chaitanya went every day to visit his devotee Haridas Thakur. Haridas, though a great devotee, could not enter the Jagannath temple because of his birth in a Muslim family.

But Krishna himself, as Lord Chaitanya, would go to see his dedicated servant Haridas. Therefore devotees say that Haridas could not go to see Jagannath, but Jagannath would go to see Haridas.

From a Toothbrush to a Tree

After receiving the bakul toothbrush, Lord Chaitanya went to Haridas’s place and planted the toothbrush in the ground. Soon the twig grew into a tall straight tree offering shade where Haridas often sat to chant Hare Krishna.

After Haridas left this world, a devotee named Jagannath Swami lived at that place. Once, as the time for Jagannath’s chariot festival approached, the king’s men came to cut down the tree to make wheels for Jagannath’s  chariot.

“Do not cut down this tree,” the swami told them. “It is a holy tree, planted by Lord Chaitanya and used by Haridas.”

A Tree Without Wood

To no avail. The next day the king’s men  came to cut down the tree. But they stopped when they saw a miracle. The tall straight tree had now bent over, winding along the ground. On the bent section, the tree had partly cracked open, revealing a hollow inside covered only with a layer of bark. It would yield no wood.

Shouldn’t it have died in that condition? But no. It had all the signs of life, leaves and all.

The hollow tree still lives. Every year in  April, on the anniversary of the planting, the locals hold a festival called Planting the Toothbrush Tree. They bathe the tree with 108 pots of water and sing songs to glorify Lord Chaitanya and his devotees like Haridas Thakur.

When you go to Jagannath Puri, you too can offer obeisances to the Siddha Bakul tree. You can also go to the samadhi or resting place of Haridas Thakur. The samadhi also encompasses a complete temple.

Each time I went there, my eye stopped at a picture on the wall. How nice to find myself in India looking at a photo of Radha and Vrindaban Chandra, the  deities in ISKCON’s temple in West Virginia, U.S.A.

The first time I went to Jagannath Puri, the samadhi-temple stood on the beach.  The second time I went, I found it a little farther back. But no one had moved the samadhi. The edge of the sea had moved itself, as seacoasts often do.

I could say more about trees and Krishna, but the topic knows no limits. But I’ll say this: I don’t take trees for granted any more, not even a tiny fig seed.

⁓Umapati Swami, February 10, 2024, Chinese New Year

Eternally touching my head to the floor at the lotus feet of my spiritual master, Srila Prabhupada, for showing me this.

Write to me: hoswami@yahoo.com

© Umapati Swami 2023

Srila Prabhupada

His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is the teacher who brought Krishna Consciousness from India to the West and then to the rest of the world. He is the founder of the worldwide Hare Krishna Movement as well as the author and compiler of many works of Vedic knowledge. He left this world in 1977.

Umapati Swami

One of the first American devotees of the Hare Krishna Movement, he became Srila Prabhupada’s disciple in 1966. Since then, he has preached Krishna Consciousness in many countries and is the author of “My Days with Prabhupada,” available from Amazon. Now 86 years old, he has started this blog to share what he has learned.