ph6 Food, Offering, Medicine, Political Symbol: What the Lotus Means in Sri Lanka

IN ONE SWIFT movement, Asoka swung his machete into the side of a tree and left the hooked blade lodged in its trunk. The Sri Lankan lotus farmer was in his late 40s, with dark, leathery skin, a graying soul patch and lips stained red from betel nut. He placed his phone in the branches and gestured to me to remove my shoes. The grass felt like rubber under my feet on that February morning. Mud oozed between my toes. “Pankajaph6,” I murmured to myself, “mud born.” It is one of over 40 words for the sacred lotus flower (Nelumbo nucifera) in Sanskrit. I rolled my corduroys up to my knees and we began to wade into the lake, which Asoka, whose full name is Y.G.W. Dissinayake, had rented for cultivation. The rising sun suffused the thin mist that hung over the water. We soon stood in several inches of soft mud and murky water, surrounded by a colony of lotuses. There were calyxes of faded pink, others in full bloom, with yellowish-white interiors and petals of translucent brightness, sheltered by broad, nodding leaves and curled, elliptical buds. Most beguiling of all was the fruiting receptacle. It looked like something that a spacecraft might have jettisoned as it breached the Earth’s atmosphere — a magical cup of unbelievable hardiness in whose waxy surface the beanlike seeds of the lotus lay embedded, with the power to fruit even after a thousand years.

Nelumbo — the scientific name for the genus of the sacred flower, first adopted by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in the early 18th century — is a Sinhalese word, and it was the lotus, in all its configurations, from physical flower to religious offering, cultural artifact to political emblem, that had brought me to Sri Lanka. I’d traveled 18 hours from New York to Colombo, this island country’s modern capital. From there, myself and Nayomi Apsara, a 44-year-old local filmmaker and poet who was my guide and translator, had driven five hours and 124 miles to the ancient capital of Anuradhapura, located amid the lakes and jungles of the north, where we met Asoka before dawn. The lake, where he leases his section for less than $100 a month, was 30 minutes from the city. Nayomi and I were in a rented car, Asoka in his white auto-rickshaw. We stopped to receive the blessings of a roadside Ganpati, the deity considered a remover of obstacles in both Buddhist Sri Lanka and Hindu India, where I’d grown up. In the half-light, bumping along a red-earth road, I saw that the land was full of water. We passed the hulking forms of trees, large portions of their trunks submerged in lakes, their canopies dark against the brightening sky. Cormorants and herons sunned themselves in the first rays of the morning. A rust-breasted jungle fowl strode along the edge of the water. We passed a sign that read, “Do not pick the flowers, the lake has been leased for cultivation.” A column of blue smoke rose from the paddies. The cement foundations of the village houses were brownish-red, their freshly swept front yards enclosed by trees whose flowers and fruits — banana, hibiscus, papaya — are used in ritual prayers, or puja, as well as for ornamentation and consumption. Outside one such house, painted a bright orange, Asoka’s landlords, an uncle and nephew in short-sleeved shirts and striped saramas (sarongs), greeted us. Then we followed the lotus farmer into the ooze.

VideoCreditCredit...10 Flowers, 10 PlacesCountries and regions around the world where flowers play a vital role — in cultural and religious traditions, the economy and daily life.

A closer look at lotuses in Sri Lanka, amaranths in Peru, roses in Oman, marigolds in India, waterlilies in Vietnam, saffron in Kashmir, jasmine in Egypt, orchids in Papua New Guinea, proteas in South Africa and azaleas in Japan.

“GROWING IN THE mud, and yet so clean, the lotus is a symbol of purity,” writes the Sri Lankan historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in his 1913 book “The Arts and Crafts of India & Ceylon.” The lotus pool, he continues, “with leaves and flowers in bud, widely opened and again dying down, is an image of the ebb and flow of human life (samsara).”

It’s amazing what a flower will tell you about a society, if you let it. In Sri Lanka, I wanted to follow the lotus out of the murk, where it was cultivated by men like Asoka, into shop stalls where enterprising sellers put it into the hands of devotees. I wanted to see it enter stone, transformed by the sculptor’s chisel into an ornament as commonplace as the egg-and-dart motif in classical Western architecture. It was a journey that would take me from Sri Lanka’s oldest capital, Anuradhapura, to its medieval seat of power, Polonnaruwa (66 miles south), then to Kandy (some 80 miles farther south), the island kingdom’s last royal capital, now a lakeside town of 1.5 million set among colonial-era tea plantations, rolling hills and rainforest. In each of these places, the signifier of kingship had been the possession of a sacred relic, a tooth of the Buddha, which had been spirited away from India in the hair ornament of a princess in the fourth century and now resided at the Temple of the Tooth (Sri Dalada Maligawa) in Kandy. Buddhism itself had come to the island from India in the third century B.C., and it was Theravada — the Way of the Elders in Pali, the language of Buddhist liturgy — that was practiced here, as in Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand.

In the lake, with fish nibbling at my feet, Asoka showed me the tiny curled tip of the lotus leaf emerging from the water. “First the leaf comes out,” he said, “one leaf, one bud, and the flower blossoms in the shade of the leaf. It protects it, like a parasol.” He’d been here only the day before in his dinghy, harvesting some 1,700 flowers, 400 stems at a time. These he sold to the sellers in the precincts of the Ruwanwelisaya stupa in Anuradhapura for 40 rupees (13 cents) a stem. They in turn sold them to devotees for four or five times that amount.

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