The most charitable among us argued that he must have been speaking figuratively. If you murmur sweet nothings to the nasturtiums, we reasoned, you are likely to be the kind of person to give them the love and care that they need to thrive. You do not have to pretend they are listening. The “response” that Prince Charles detected would be in the way they burgeoned and blossomed, rather than pillow talk from the flower bed.
What Earth naturally looks like when it is clean environmental paradise with human harmony. For although plants are complex and mysterious in many ways, they neither hear nor speak, except in children’s literature. Yet from time to time we read of experiments suggesting that subjecting them to blasts of music and other sounds, as their seeds are springing into life, can enhance vigor and performance. Reports of the phenomenon crop up as regularly as the bindweed on my allotment, and are just as persistent.
Last week QVC, a television shopping channel, aired the issue again when it released an album of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing Mozart to an audience of a hundred plants. It’s called The Flora Seasons: Music to Grow to (which raises the question why they chose Mozart rather than Verdi). The album can be downloaded from QVC’s website as a celebration, so they say, of the start of the gardening season. More - What effect does music have on plants? - VIDEO: The Secret Lives of Plants - Do flowers have a separate secret life?
Why Plants Really Matter
Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)
It's not a coincidence that the Buddha reached enlightenment under a tree. His tree was a kind of fig (Ficus religiosa). But previous teaching-buddhas had reached the same goal under different trees. One's spinal column is like a flexible stem, and the crown of one's head a flower that blossoms with a thousand petals. Bowing is like laying the flower in front of someone or something we honor. This is the mystic-yogic imagery of chakras, energetic wheels with petals. The spine is also like a great tree that fruits first with compassion, then wisdom, then liberation. The Story of the Lineage In "The Story of the Lineage" [Nidanakatha (with lines from the Buddhavamsa, the 14th book of sacred scriptures as preserved by recitation), translated by Rhys Davids in Buddhist Birth-Stories (Jataka Tales), pp. 81-232], the Buddha details certain important elements of former buddhas. He covers the incalculable period between the time he became the Bodhisattva up to his life as the Buddha Gautama and includes the details of buddhas who gave him the sure prediction of one day becoming a Supremely-Enlightened-One. Those elements include their name, the names of their chief disciples, and curiously the type of tree under which they gained enlightenment. For example, part of the text explains that a previous buddha (possibly Kondanya Buddha) and his many disciples received generous alms from the Bodhisattva (the future Shakyamuni Buddha). They were so generous that he pondered who this person was that had given them. He discerned with his psychic faculties that it was a future buddha: "This man has given such great alms, who can he be?" and perceiving that at the end of two incalculable-aeons and 4,000 cycles he would become the Buddha Gautama, addressing the Bodhisattva, he made his prediction. The Bodhisattva saw no sense in continuing in the worldly life if in the future he would be a buddha, so he ordained, embraced the ascetic life, learned the Buddha-Dharma, gained superknowledges (psychic powers), and the eight attainments (eight "meditative absorptions" or jhanas), and was reborn in the Brahma world. In that life the Bodhisattva was the brahmin Suruci.
"The city of Mangala Buddha was called Uttara; his father was the warrior-caste noble Uttara; his mother was Uttaraa; Sudeva and Dhammasena were his two chief male-disciples. The Naga was his enlightenment (bodhi) tree. His body was 88 cubits high. When [he passed into nirvana], after he had lived 90,000 years, at the same time 10,000 worlds were [enveloped] in darkness, and in all worlds there was a great cry and lamentation of men." [Apparently humans are widespread throughout the cosmos, rather than there just being one "human world"].
After Mangala Buddha passed away, shrouding in darkness 10,000 worlds, the Buddha Sumana appeared. He also had three assemblies of disciples. In the first assembly there were one million millions disciples, in the second, on the Golden Mountain, 90 million of millions, in the third 80 million of millions."
"At this time the Bodhisattva was the Naga ruler Atula, mighty and powerful. And hearing that a buddha had appeared, he left the Naga [extraterrestrial reptilian] world, accompanied by his assembled kinsfolk. Making offerings with divine [heavenly, from space, extra-terrestrial] music to the Buddha Sumana, whose retinue was a million million monastics, and having given great gifts, bestowing upon each two robe-garments of fine cloth, he was established in the Three Guides [Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha]. And this teaching-buddha also foretold of him: 'One day he will be a buddha.' "
"The city of this buddha was named Khema; Sudatta was his father, Sirima his mother, Sarana and Bhavitatta his chief male-disciples, Udena his assistant, Sona and Upasona his chief female-disciples. The Naga was his enlightenment-tree..." (Buddhist Birth-Stories, pp. 122-124).
This is just a slice of interesting ancient Buddhist oral tradition. It indicates not only the importance of plants, but the widespread dispersal of humans throughout space (other planets and worlds in this ten-thousandfold world system, of which there are countless such systems), the cyclical nature of time and society, the prominence of women (in that buddhas always have chief female disciples in addition to a tree, which is not always a banyan or fig tree, and varying numbers of enlightened disciples), the strange and changing status of reptilian shape-shifters (Nagas) in Buddhist cosmology, who are sometimes characterized as angry and above humans and at other times angry and beneath humans, and the breadth of time the Buddha discussed, spanning incalculable aeons, which means there is no ultimate beginning point for evolution (but instead devolution, punctuated equilibrium, evolution, creative meddling from space or a kind of "creationism" to that extent, and cycles upon cycles within cycles).
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