树式背后的神话揭示了如何开启内在力量？

Published November 12, 2026 06:30AM

Yoga Journal’s archives series is a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. This article about Tree Pose mythology first appeared in the January-February 1989 issue of Yoga Journal. 

According to Joseph Campbell, the symbol of the tree in Indian mythology is deeply rooted in the pre-Aryan civilization of the Indus Valley, which flourished around 2000 B.C. In particular, one of the iconographic seals excavated earlier this century from the ruined city of Harappa shows a nude goddess standing in the branches of a sacred pipal tree, surrounded by female attendants and other supplicants engaged in a fertility ritual or sacrifice.

The motif of a tree-goddess sheltered in the boughs of a tree reappears in all subsequent periods of Indian art, whether Buddhist, Hindu, or Jain. Buddha himself attained enlightenment under a pipal tree, also known as the bodhi tree, or Tree of Wisdom, and early Buddhists shared with the more primitive fertility cult the popular belief that trees are divine beings with magical properties. Hence, at the early Buddhist stupas at Sanchi, figures of female tree guardians (yakshas) are given special prominence on the ornamental gateways leading to the egg-shaped monument.

The belief in the magical powers of trees and tree-spirits lingers on even today in rural India, as shown by the following anecdote from the early life of the Indian saint Nityananda. “He sometimes wore a loincloth, sometimes was nude, and lived a life of great simplicity;” writes biographer M. U. Hatengdi. “His home was in the rocks, caves, and forests. It was a familiar sight to see him perched on some tree top, standing stiff…”

“Crowds often gathered below the tree on which he stood, crowds that were mixed without regard for caste or creed. After a time, the Master would shower them with leaves: these leaves were greatly prized as medicine. One day a man who had lost his sight stood among the crowd beneath the tree…He continued pleading with the Master to restore his sight, explaining that as it was, he was not able to earn a living and so was a burden to his family. After a considerable time, Nityananda came to him and rubbed the man’s eves with leaves from the tree…On arising the next morning, the man was able to see and his sight remained restored.”

Nityananda was a saint who practiced the most severe of yogic austerities. During his early years, he ate food only when it was offered to him by others. He wore a loincloth not from modesty but at the insistence of his disciples. “He had a total disregard for the elements or for his nightly resting place…and would sit or lie down any place, from the doormat and dunghill to the cattleshed and even the dry lavatories, just to avoid crowds.” He believed that vairagya (total renunciation or absence of desire) was essential for his spiritual progress.

Vrksasana (Tree Pose) itself derives from a traditional act of austerity. According to scholar Georg Feuerstein, the practice of standing on one leg (known as Eka Pada Sthana) has been followed in India for at least two thousand years, and is referred to in the Mahabharata. In that great Indian epic, Pandu stands on one leg all day long in order to propitiate the god Indra (1.123), and Manu (the father of the human race) stands on one leg for a thousand years (III.187).

The most beautiful and dramatic representation of the practice of Eka Pada Sthana is found in the huge relief-sculpture at Mamallapuram, near Madras, dating from the seventh century A.D. Here, as Heinrich Zimmer writes, “A huge wall of rock, rising vertically in the fierce sunshine of southern India, has been converted into a prodigious masterpiece, teeming with hosts of gods, titans, genii, serpent princes, human beings, and animals, all converging towards a great cleft in the middle of the composition,” which represents the descent of the Ganges from heaven to earth.

This ancient Shaivite myth relates how the holy sage Bhagiratha performed great acts of austerity for a thousand years to compel the gods to let the heavenly river Ganges flow down to Earth, and how he then persuaded Lord Shiva to receive the full weight of the cataract on his head, lest the Earth be destroyed by the impact of the falling water. At Mamallapuram, we see the stoic figure of Bhagiratha standing on one leg, with his arms raised overhead in supplication, at the very moment when Shiva gives his consent and all the orders of creation burst into celebration at the flow of the sacred river.

The Descent of the Ganges as depicted at Mamallapuram can be interpreted as an allegory of our spiritual journey. Through clarity of purpose and unwavering dedication, the solitary yogi reaches a place of inner stillness—as quiet as the rock, as empty as the void.

But in that emptiness, like the emptiness that existed before creation, there is potential for a tremendous surge of psychic energy (the Ganges). This energy can overwhelm or corrupt the individual, as all power tends to corrupt, unless it is offered back to its divine source (Lord Shiva) and received as a sign of grace, not as confirmation of an inflated ego. When we surrender in this way, we begin to experience the vibratory movement of the world, and we know at last the joy of creation.