The Sri Lankan monarch Devanampiya Tissa, “on the road sprinkled with white sand and bestrewn with various flowers and adorned with planted pennons and festoons of blossoms, brought the great Bodhi tree to the city of Anuradhapura, and at the time when the shadows increase, entered the Mahameghavana, lifted down the great Bodhi tree and loosed his hold. Hardly had he let it leave his hands but it rose up eight cubits into the air, and floating thus it sent forth glorious rays of six colors. Spreading over the island, reaching to the Brahma world, these lovely rays lasted til sunset. Then a thousand persons who were filled with faith by reason of this miracle, gaining spiritual insight and attaining to arahantship (the state of having reached nirvana), received here the pabbajja.(the vocation of a Buddhist renunciant, on the path of their becoming a monk)…When the great Bodhi tree had come down and the roots struck into the earth, all the people who had come together from the country all round worshipped it with offerings of perfume and flowers.”
—— from Chapter 19, “The Coming of the Bodhi Tree”, in the epic chronicle of Sri Lanka the Mahavamsa, in which is related the transfer to the island, at the order of King Ashoka in the year BCE 288, of a branch cut from the original sacred fig, or Bo tree (Ficus religiosa), under which Siddartha Gautama received enlightenment, and its planting in the Mahamegha (Great Rain) Garden at the ancient Sri Lankan capital Anuradhapura. Buddhist nuns and monks at prayer on the tree terrace were massacred by Tamil Tigers on May 14, 1985, the first attack outside Tamil territory. This tree is said to be the oldest living being on earth with a known date of birth, for its documented year of transplant according to the Mahavamsa..
Sri Lankan Buddhists celebrate the monthly full moon festival, or poya, by abstaining from meat and alcohol and making a pilgrimage to the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, where relatives of those fallen ill water the tree for seven days to seek their recovery. On February 19, the poya of the lunar month of navam, the tree terrace was mobbed with pilgrims, some making offerings of their first day’s harvest of rice in the shrines at the tree terrace’s four corners, others sitting against the back wall facing the tree with trembling lips and their hands in namaskar.
