Belief, Bounty, and Beauty : Rituals around Sacred Trees in India

Leiden: Brill, 2005. First edition. Hardcover. near fine. Octavo. x, 509, (1)pp. Index and 60 page bibliography. Pictorial buckram with lilac/gray spine lettered in white. A fine but ex-library copy (with minimal markings; i.e. rubber stamps on title page & bottom of text block).

This study is focused on the interaction of material and symbolic values in the domain of sacred trees in India. By presenting samples from 3,000 years of Indian ritual practice, it is shown that in many sacred geographies trees continue to connect the present with the past, the material with the symbolic, and the contemporary ecological with the traditionally sacred. Although in India religion may have become very much a temple cult, its embeddedness in the natural world enhances today's 'green' interpretation of religious traditions. That in environmental matters such religious inspiration may be both successful and highly ambivalent at the same time is the thought-provoking position taken in the final chapters. (Publisher)

Contents: Symbol and sacredness : trees in ancient religious literature -- Forests, woods, groves, parks and greens : the king's duty, the poet's beauty -- Buddha, Buddhism, and the bodhi tree -- Gods of wood, gods of stone : the ritual renewal of the wooden statues at Purī -- Contemporary tree worship -- Planting and prasād versus plunder and pollution : sacred trees in Indian environmental movements -- Belief, bounty, and beauty : the interrelatedness of symbolic and material values.

Volume 108 in the Brill's series, "Numen Book Series. Studies in the History of Religions."