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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Fugitive Philosophers I In the Sri Lankan forest
Is there really a tree that can still the universe? And if so, where in Sri Lanka might you find it?
Are ebony trees happy – and if they are, are they happier than most other trees in Sri Lanka? How can you tell what makes them happy? In fact, what is happiness for trees, still less so for animals or people? And where exactly does happiness fit on the line between survival, living, and making things better?
“To the mind that is still,” advised the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu "the whole universe surrenders." What a thought is this! Surely, it is streets beyond mere happiness. It is real contentment, isn’t it. Happiness at its purest, its least volatile.
Still, I wonder what this antique guru from 6th century BCE China actually meant? If ultra-happiness is synonymous with being still, how do you spot it?
Is it everything that is immobile? Are any of my friends and acquaintances still?
Can you be happy if you are fully occupied merely trying to keep show on the road?
Will it visit you for any time at all if you spend that time constantly seeking to improve things?
Or, as I often wonder, are my dogs the clue to it all?
Waking at 5 today to the sound of the babblers, sunbirds and barbets in the mango tree outside my room, my dogs almost immediately curled themselves into a family pack and began grooming one another. Their undiluted instinct to care for one another is as humbling as a soft sigh.
These schnauzers will spend their day barking, sniffing, playing, cuddling, sleeping, eating, investigating, licking and ineffectually chasing squirrels and skinks
They know they need to worry about providing their own food or ever fret about the quality of their board.
They appear to have no concept of worrying about what might ever come. Their world is fixed; its people and animals known and all its many surprises largely familiar but always treated with the joy of the unexpected.
True, in the literal sense, they are rarely still, but if Lao Tzu had them under his watchful eye right now, I have little doubt he would unequivocally say they have the whole universe under their paws.
As I think, does ebony have it under its comforting dark and spreading branches.
Scientists and taxonomists have got themselves into a terrible muddle about ebony. They have kept the word to describe any tropical or subtropical tree that is hard and dark but held back from assigning it to a single botanical classification. The consequences are a bit like trying to play chess at a rave. Most Ebony trees come from the genus Diospyros, but it is a club with almost 800 members, almost all of whom aren't hard or dark at all. Some are barely trees. Others are lowly shrubs. A few actually produce edible fruits rather than dark wood – like Persimmon.
Given that scientists are forever trotting off to have jamborees and read academic papers to one another, it is disappointing that they have failed to do better than this when it comes to ebony
What most people call the ebony tree is one of Sri Lanka's most important and remarkable indigenous plants. And one that is truly capable of giving some more than helpful clues about happiness (the point of); purpose and mindfulness.
There are a tiny handful of trees for which the term ebony might, with full justification, be limited to.
There is Gabon ebony, solid and jet black; Macassar ebony, which has a multi-coloured black grain; Mauritius ebony, now almost extinct; Vietnamese ebony, so rare that its export is now banned - and the one I like to think of as mine - Diospyros ebenum, Ceylon ebony.
For me, this is all a fine ebony should really be: a glossy black core at its heart, occasionally streaked by lighter fibres, all the better to set off the surrounding darkness.
It has a very straight grain, though it is occasionally interrupted by the odd wavy line, as if it is telling you that the best way to demonstrate such perfect rectitude is to have the odd contrary moment. The wood has a practically metallic gloss, as if you're gazing into a dark mirror.
It has a hardness twice that of the mighty oak and can resist almost everything: extreme heat, water, temperature swings. Put it in water, and it will simply sink, so dense is it.
My guess is that a lot of trees aren't happier than are most people. Like us, they are far too busy trying to survive -to stretch out their relatively short lifespans as much as possible.
But Ceylon ebony can live for over 200 years, and it grows at the slowest of all rates, rarely reaching more than 100 feet in height. Nearly half of all tree species live shorter lives, and the ones we see most around us have such ephemeral lives that they are like day flies by comparison.
Taller trees, fatter trees, trees almost as dark or nearly as heavy, exist, but no tree on earth brings all these qualities to life within a single plant. Only ebony – and of what can be called real ebony, it is Ceylon ebony that is,by a country mile, the finest of the lot.
AE Houseman, that curious, reclusive buttoned-up Latin scholar from 19th-century Oxford, lived an internal life that anything that buttoned up. And it was he who wrote the ultimate tree poem – the one I often recount to myself as I pass one of the few rare ebony trees growing in my jungle here at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel.
True, Houseman did not exactly have ebony in mind when he penned his best poem – it was instead a cherry.
Exotic tropical trees were, after all, far from his experience. Little given to travel outside Europe; his only glamorous trip was a brief stay in Constantinople to check out Roman ruins.
Even so, his poem Loveliest of Trees, written well more than two world wars away, back in distant 1895, is a poem about living life now.
Cherry trees live barely more than 20 years, so getting on with things is important to them, Carpe Diem, you might say, as did many a suburban house built around Hoseman’s time in the leafy home countries.
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
Psalms 90:10 makes it horribly clear that time is finite – so finite as to be easily countable even by those who see maths as a branch of early Sanskrit.
But no matter. Your own eye can tell you that cherry blossom is beautiful. So – get on with it. And so in what is perhaps his most famous poem, Houseman did -
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
There are only a few real cherry trees on the island, mostly in the cool hill station of Nuwara Eliya, but what the country lacks in cherry it more than compensates for with its native tree species – which number over 3500. Few other lands offer tree-huggers the prospect of so orgiastic a time.
And ebony, now so rare as to be almost figurative, is the king of the lot.
The tree is shared, as are many of its indigenous trees in Sri Lanka, with South India, especially along the Western Ghats, and around Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
The south Indian kings loved the wood. For these ever-warring Chera, Chola and Pandya rulers, ebony heartwood was, after all, the preferred material for sceptres and staffs of office.
Its extreme durability and unrivalled beauty also made it the ultimate wood for Sri Lanka’s ancient chieftains and later-day millionaires – for any number of pieces of furniture, especially beds and tables.
I can personally testify to the unparalleled quiet euphoria of lying on a capacious four-poster ebony bed, as I sometimes do here, looking out over the jungle on a monsoon day and listening to the rain drum down like a choir of angels on corrugated zinc roofs.
It sounds just like it must have done as it fell on the copper roof shingles of the Brazen Palace in 3rd century BCE Anuradhapura, the building the ancient Sri Lankan kings made to guide men to heaven, its beams and lintels also made of ebony. With the least of fuss, without so much as an UMMM or a conscious move to meditation, you are made utterly still.
In the past, when temple building was still popular, Sri Lankans used ebony for religious pillars and arches. For palace doors and alcoves. They preferred it for any really important carvings, temporal or spiritual.
And if you really wanted your knife or sword handle to last or your opium pipe to endure, you would order it made from ebony.
Musicians especially loved it, its ability to withstand repeated fingering made it ideal for piano keys, guitar fingerboards, tuning pegs, tailpieces, and nuts.
The next time you ever sit back to enjoy a raga – that hauntingly fluid melodic Indian music, remember that the sound comes from instruments always made from Ceylon ebony. From two, actually: the Tanpura, which the musicians use to map out the notes of a raga, and the Rudra Veena, which gives the music its slow, majestic build.
As you would expect from such an iconic wood, ebony is extremely particular about how and where it grows. It never fears making a fuss.
It has a marked preference for altitudes below 500 feet, for temperatures that do not exceed 35 degrees and for rainfall of around 1,200 mm. It hates being waterlogged, and well-drained, mildly acidic clay soils are its happy place. It likes to start its life in shade, but given it shade as it gets older, and would rather die rather than grow past it.
Which makes it a bit of a miracle that we have a number growing, albeit at a speed that makes tortoises look reckless, here on our 1,000-foot-high jungle plantation, The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel.
You are much more likely to find the tree growing in Trincomalee and around Polonnaruwa – anywhere around dry evergreen forests of the North Central, Northern, and Eastern provinces; anywhere, in fact, except Kandy. But miracles, when they do happen, are always welcome. “As for me,” said Walt Whitman, “I know nothing else but miracles,” ever a man after ebony trees.
Even so, it is a miracle there are any ebony trees left on the island at all, given how overexploited the tree has been for centuries. In fact, it's now illegal to harvest, cut, or fell live trees.
If you want ebony wood, you must wait for an old tree to die or fall naturally, then get a permit to cut it up. This gives old ebony furniture the sort of resale value usually reserved for impressionist paintings at Christie's and Sotheby's.
Ayurvedic doctors use tiny amounts of it for some of the most niche medicines where it is valued for its
astringent, cooling, balancing and anti-inflammatory properties. Its bark, heartwood, and seed oils are used in treatments to reduce gum disease, heal cuts, and manage arthritis. For such patients, it probably occupies the sort of place that gold leaf does at Harrods, where you can book a $400 Gold Facial or, if you're feeling a little in the pinch, confine yourself to their $20 gold-leaf cross-dressing.
The tree has even lent itself to one of Buddhism’s most prescient political homilies – the Jataka 520. In this – the story of the Fragrant Ebony Tree, Lord Buddha is reborn as a tree-divinity residing within a fragrant ebony tree outside a city, where he eventually intervenes to guide a failing king. The religious duties of a bad leader are laid bare, a lesson that might have been useful at several times over the past few decades in downtown Kotte, home of the Sri Lankan government.
If this were not enough of a warning, then there is always the fallback of the Kalu Kumaraya - the "Black Prince". This ebony dark demon of Sri Lankan folklore causes so many afflictions that exorcists today are still kept busy by his antics.
More kindly are the stories linked to the ebony forests of the ancient forest monastery of Ritigala. Legend has it that the monkey god Hanuman dropped a piece of the Himalayas here while carrying medicinal herbs – and this gave the monastery's ebony forests a mystical status. Ebony trees still grow there today – one, said to be almost 200 years old, stands over 60 metres high and spreads 10 metres.
But it is not their rarity, or value, or size, or beauty that makes this or any other Sri Lankan ebony happy. For happy they are, the happiest of all trees.
Happy - because they have a way of simply getting on with life on their own terms. They cannot be made to do their thing; it is a hopeless tree to ever try to commercialise.
It neither focuses on surviving nor on making its life better. It simply lives, exuding the sort of stillness you rarely see in your social group, unless it's one dominated by schnauzers.
It is a tree of rare and real contentment, the most philosophical of all trees and certainly the loveliest of all.