The sacred banyan tree of eastern India and Malaysia grows so large that it must support and feed itself by sending down new roots from its massive branches. These roots become new trunks from which more branches spread so that the banyan grows wider and wider until a single tree looks like a whole grove of trees with 100 or even 200 trunks. The tree may eventually cover an area more than 300 metres in diameter. Some trees are used as marketplaces. People set their stalls between the roots and buy and sell their goods beneath the natural shelter of the branches. In fact, Hindu merchants were once called merchants. Its root and branches reached to Earth to bring blessings to humankind.

The banyan became a potent symbol of fertility, life and resurrection. It features in Hindu stories of the universe’s periodic death and rebirth, when everything that exists dissolves into a ceaseless sea. One story says an ‘undying’ banyan is the only thing to survive the deluge. Another says that to ride the sea’s currents, the god Vishnu assumes the form of a baby, lying on his back on a raft formed of a banyan leaf. With one breath the baby swallows all that surrounds it, taking the turbulent universe into the safety of his stomach before exhaling it into fresh existence.