Lotus

“ She grovelled on the marble floor, And kissed the dead child o'er and o'er. And suddenly upon the air There fell the answer to her prayer: "Bring me to-night a lotus tied With thread from a house where none has died." She rose, and laughed with thankful joy, Sure that the god would save the boy. She found a lotus by the stream; She plucked it from its noonday dream, And then from door to door she fared, To ask what house by Death was spared. Her heart grew cold to see the eyes Of all dilate with slow surprise: "Kilvani, thou hast lost thy head; Nothing can help a child that's dead. ”

“ This is followed by a band of mousmes, hiding their laughing faces beneath a kind of veil, and carrying in vases of the sacred shape the artificial lotus with silver petals indispensable at a funeral; then come fine ladies, on foot, smirking and stifling a wish to laugh, beneath parasols on which are painted, in the gayest colors, butterflies and storks.
Now they are quite close to us, we must stand back to give them room. Chrysantheme all at once assumes a suitable air of gravity, and Yves bares his head, taking off the magpie’s nest.
Yes, it is true, it is death that is passing! ”

“ What then will thou resemble but a blue delicious lotus, trampled in the mire of a city street by the foot of every passer-by; a lotus, whose appropriate position is either the pool in the silence of the forest, or the head of a king? ”

“ The lotus-eater, his hands under his relaxed head, his limbs extended, and pressing the earth beneath him like a dead weight, gives to the eye this impression of serenity, of a lifeless indolence, that his heated fancy, burning within him, awfully negatives. ”

“ His face is smiling, His eyes are as wide as lotus petals, and His cloth is yellow as the filament of the Kadamba flower. His armlets glitter with gems and gold. His crown and earrings sparkle with brilliant stones. Adepts in Yoga place His feet on the pericarp of the full blown lotus in the heart. With Him is Srî (Lakshmî) . The Kaustubha gem is on His neck. He is adorned with a garland of ever blooming wild flowers. His hair is curling and deep blue. His very look is full of kindness to all. ”

“ In the Western World the lotus has been changed to the rose. The roses of the Rosicrucian, the roses of the Masonic degrees, and also those of the Order of the Garter in England, all stand for the same thing, the awakening of consciousness and the unfolding into full bloom of the soul qualities of man. When man awakens and opens this bud within himself, he finds, like the gold pollen in a flower, this wonderful spiritual city, Shamballa, in the heart of the lotus. ”

“ The Lotus is the seat of most deities, but notably so of the creator Brahma, who, thus enthroned, is called the Kamāl-a-yoni, or the great androgynous god. The lotus is the womb of all creation. It is said to originate from the great fertiliser, water, alone; and dropping its great leaves on this fertiliser as on a bed, it springs upwards with a slender, elegant stalk, and spreads forth in a lovely flower. Even the grave and mighty Vishnoo delights in the lotus, which is one of the four emblems he holds in his fourfold arms. It is Venus’ sacred flower. ”

“ On the journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.
The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them as a mass ”

“ When the buds are nearly ready to open they look as if they were about to explode and fill the air with their intense color. The huge leaves are brilliant and lovely—light green and delicately veined. But the lotus was never made for art, and only religion could have made it acceptable to art. ”

“ There are Egyptian altar-pieces upon which the lotus figures as the tree of life. The Hindu priests say that the lotus rising out of the lakes is the type of the world issuing out of the ocean of time.
Travellers who have observed the worship of the Hindus and Parsees, tell us that they give religious honours to the lotus. The Budhist priests cultivate it in precious vases, and place it in their temples. The Chinese poets celebrate the sacred bean of India, out of which their god Amida and her child arose, in the middle of a lake. ”

“ The lotus is another sacred plant of the Land of the Rising Sun, and the lesson taught from that flower is that purity comes out of impurity. The lotus will grow in dirty pools, but the open flower will be as pure as if grown in a clear mountain stream. ”

“ The poor used its bulb for food in times of scarcity. The Indian lotus, or Nelumbium, is not seen in the sculptures, though Latin writers say it existed in Egypt. It may have been this that had the lethean properties; although the modern eaters and smokers of Indian hemp appear to be the legitimate descendants of the lotus-eaters of the poets. However, the lotus whose stalks and buds gave character to a distinct architectural style, we enquired for in vain on the Nile. If it still grows there it would scarcely be visible above water in the winter. ”

“ The lotus capital appears likewise as a shaft decorated with buds around it (fig. 85) . In this case the buds are the short, thick ones of the rose lotus, with flowers of the blue lotus put in the intervals under the abacus. But the lotus bud soon became treated as a solid support, and in the capital of the blue lotus (fig. 86) the whole is formed of four lotus buds. The bands of the tie were always strongly marked, however changed the capital might become in later time. The papyrus column belongs mainly to the XIXth dynasty, as in the great hall of Karnak. ”

“ In his inquiries into the natural history of these countries, our traveller bestowed particular attention upon the palm and the lotus-tree, the latter of which, though greatly celebrated in ancient authors, is still comparatively little known. From the descriptions of Herodotus, Theophrastus, and Pliny, he infers the identity of the lotus of the ancients with the seedra of the Arabs, which is a shrub of common occurrence in the Jereed, and other parts of Barbary ”

“ The lotus was the sacred plant of the Brahminical rites of India, and was considered as the symbol of their elemental trinity,—earth, water, and air,—because, as an aquatic plant, it derived its nutriment from all of these elements combined, its roots being planted in the earth, its stem rising through the water, and its leaves exposed to the air.192 The Egyptians, who borrowed a large portion of their religious rites from the East, adopted the lotus, which was also indigenous to their country, as a mystical plant, and made it the symbol of their initiation, or the birth into celestial light. ”

“ The Chapter of making the transformation into a lotus. The overseer of the palace, the chancellor-in-chief, Nu, saith:
“I am the pure lotus which springeth up from the divine splendor that belongeth to the nostrils of Ra. I have made [my way] , and I follow on seeking for him who is Horus. I am the pure one who cometh forth out of the Field.”
TRANSFORMATION INTO A LOTUS
[From the Papyrus of Paqrer (see Naville, op. cit., Bd. I. Bl. 93) .]
The Chapter of making the transformation into a lotus. Saith Osiris Paqrer:
“Hail, thou lotus, thou type of the god Nefer-Temu! ”

“ In the very remotest part are seated idols, and from outside one can vaguely see their clasped hands and air of rapt mysticism; in front are the altars, loaded with marvellous vases in metalwork, whence spring graceful clusters of gold and silver lotus. From the very entrance one is greeted by the sweet odor of the incense-sticks unceasingly burned by the priests before the gods.
To penetrate into the dwelling of our friends the bonzes, which is situated on the right side as you enter, is by no means an easy matter. ”

“ The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, has been regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it is supposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. But close examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vessel in the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which are tiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant and seed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into new plants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the new life. ”

“ The people of that land were harmless and friendly, but the land itself was most dangerous. For there grew there the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus that makes all men forgetful of their past and neglectful of their future. ”

“ The “lotus” or “lotos” of northern Africa, the fruit of which was supposed to possess the wonderful power of making all who tasted it forget their “homes and friends and native shores,” is a tree, the Celtis Australis. If the ancients, who delighted so much in fables and myths, had only known of this charming place, they would have located their lotus-land here in the distant East, where the air is so pure and balmy, and the scenery so enchanting.
About a mile and a half beyond Tompasso we came to a number of “mud-wells,” and I began to examine them ”

“ The lotus-plant (Nymphæa nelumbo) the variety in which the leaves grow up out of the water and do not lie on its surface, is shown at Fig. 121, and drawings, evidently from nature, at Fig. 122, from the tomb of Ptah-Hotep.
The lotus flower in ornament may be seen in the ceiling 90decorations from tombs at Fig. 123, Nos. 3 and 5; at Figs. 118, 124; and in the painted frieze from Thebes (Fig. 125) , where the similarity between this and the Assyrian lotus, fir-cone and daisy may be noticed (see Fig. 167) . ”

“ Chinese workmen,—amongst whom we are warned that there are spies and Boxers,—who look after the fires in the two furnaces in our palace, have kept us almost too warm all night. When we get up there is, as there was yesterday, [110] another illusion of summer on our light verandah with the green columns painted with pink lotus flowers. An almost burning sun is rising and shining upon the ghostly pilgrimage which I am about to make on horseback, toward the west, outside the Tartar City, and through the ashy, silent, ruined suburbs. ”

“ The so-called lotus of this country is really a species of water-lily, the Nelumbium, which inhabits shallow ponds, where fore the Japanese Buddhists compare a virtuous man dwelling in this wicked world to a lotus-flower growing out of the mud. ”

“ The lotus has been imported into Japan, and the people seem to have been more inspired in their art work by it than by anything else to be found in the field of nature.
When the petals of the lotus blossom fall, they leave behind a seed cup three inches in diameter. These seed cups contain immense seeds, of such shape that the ancient Greek and Latin writers used to speak of them as "Egyptian beans." They were eaten in large quantities by the people of the valley of the Nile. The Egyptians sometimes made a kind of bread of these seeds. ”

“ A rain of lotus flowers falls upon him, and lotus-plants open themselves under his feet on each step he takes. The crescent of the moon on the hind part of his head must refer to his heavenly or perhaps princely origin [34] .
On the following sculptures we see the young king’s son, most times on his father’s knees, honoured by brahmins and laymen. His mother is no more to be seen, because she (as every Buddha-mother) died seven days after his birth. ”

“ The lotus and poppy were sacred among all Eastern nations, and were consecrated to the various virgins worshiped by them. These virgins are represented holding this plant in their hands, just as the Virgin, adored by the Christians, is represented at the present day. [329:2] Mr. Squire, speaking of this plant, says:
"It is well known that the 'Nymphe'—lotus or water-lily—is held sacred throughout the East, and the various sects of that quarter of the globe represented their deities either decorated with its flowers, holding it as a sceptre, or seated on a lotus throne or pedestal. ”

“ Simrock’s Deutsche Volksbücher, Vol. III, p. 399.
23 Lakshmí or Śrí the goddess of Prosperity appeared after the churning of the ocean with a lotus in her hand. According to another story she is said to have appeared at the creation floating on the expanded leaves of a lotus-flower. The hand of a lady is often compared to a lotus. ”

“ In the centre, on an upturned lotus flower, is a seated figure of Kwan-Yin in robes of green and yellow; the other portions of her body in biscuit, as are also the leaves of the lotus flower; under these is a giant leaf supporting the whole; on either side of the Kwan-Yin are two male attendants, the one standing on a lotus flower, the other on a leaf; these figures are in biscuit relieved with green enamel. Under the figure of the goddess is a carp in yellow enamel rising from the waves, which are in green, and immediately in front is a sacred vessel in green enamel on an aubergine base. ”

“ CHAPTER LV A WITHERED LOTUS-FLOWER One evening, in my cabin, in the midst of the Yellow Sea, my eyes fall upon the lotus-blossoms brought from Diou-djen-dji; they had lasted several days; but now they are withered, and strew my carpet pathetically with their pale pink petals.
I, who have carefully kept so many faded flowers, fallen, alas! into dust, stolen here and there, at moments of parting in different parts of the world ”