"Banyan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... island was of primordial origin. The entire horizon was hidden behind a curtain of wonderful forests. Enormous trees, sometimes as high as 200 feet, were linked to each other by garlands of tropical creepers, genuine natural hammocks that swayed in a mild breeze. There were mimosas, banyan trees, beefwood, teakwood, hibiscus, screw pines, palm trees, all mingling in wild profusion; and beneath the shade of their green canopies, at the feet of their gigantic trunks, there grew ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... turf, forming pleasant glades. The plantations were generally neatly fenced and often extensive; as much as twenty or thirty acres in one plot. Every now and then they passed on the roadside a noble tree, with wide-spread, drooping branches, a species of banyan tree, under which was often seen a bullock-waggon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... very extensive system of irrigation. To prepare it for cultivation, the land is first overflowed, and the labourer hoes, and ploughs, and harrows, while he stands knee deep in mud and water. It is first grown in plots and then transplanted. The banyan-tree is very abundant, and so is the bamboo, which supplies them with food, lodging, and clothing, besides, from its stately growth, forming a delightful shade to their villages. The sugar-cane is grown, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... said that every known tree and shrub is grown there; and when one considers that every foot of its soil has been carried to its place, the wonder is how it has all been done. The blossoms seem to say, "The whole world is here and in bloom." The banyan tree grows here luxuriantly and is a great curiosity. The main trunk of the tree grows to the height of about thirty or forty feet. The first branches, and indeed many of the upper branches, strike down into the ground. These give the trees the ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... do you think, was that which old Christian had in that famous fight of his with Apollyon, long ago? He cut the fiend to the marrow with it, you remember, at last; though the battle went hardly with him, too, for a time. Some of his blood, Banyan says, is on the stones of the valley to this day. That is a vague record of the combat between the man and the dragon in that strange little valley, with its perpetual evening twilight and calm, its meadows crusted with lilies, its herd-boy with his quiet song, close upon the precincts of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... whose boughs, untouched by cattle, come sweeping down to the ground, and then, continuing, seem to lie on and extend themselves along it, yards beyond their contact. Underneath, it reminds one of sketches of encampments in Hindostan beneath banyan trees, where white tent cloths are stretched from branch to branch. Tent cloths might be stretched here in similar manner, and would enclose a goodly space. Or in the boughs above, a savage's tree-hut might be built, and yet ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... increases in children; otherwise he would be destroyed." She is worshipped, i.e., her painted image is worshipped, with perfumes, flowers, incense, food, and other enjoyable things (II. 18).[56] Another practice that is very common is the worship of holy trees. One may compare the banyan at Bodhi Gay[a] with the 'worshipful' village-tree of II. 24. 23. Seldom and late is the use of a rosary mentioned (e.g., III. 112. 5, aksham[a]l[a], elsewhere aksha), although the word is employed to make an ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... called by titles equivalent to the "tree of life," and are thus connected with the nigh innumerable myths which relate to some mystic tree as the source of life. The ash Ygdrasyl of the Edda, the oak of Dordona and of the Druid, the modern Christmas tree, the sacred banyan, the holy groves, illustrate but faintly the prevalence of tree worship. Even so late as the time of Canute, it had to be forbidden in England by ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... coagulated froth, and vanishes with his edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable; while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as seeds are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a thousand years." I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it be superfluous impute it to ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... found in possession of the avoided spot. India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to. And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox, or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied upon the tree or some ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... to this sort of vainglorious recording. As Willis says in his Home Journal at the time, "Mr. Tupper is among us, feeling his way through the wilderness of his laurels, and realising his share of Emerson's 'banyan' similitude,—the roots that have passed under the sea and come up on this side of the Atlantic rather smothering him with their thriftiness in republican soil." I suppose by ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... body in the simple way. As the seed is within the banyan tree, and within the seed are the flowers, the fruits, and the shade: So the germ is within the body, and within that germ is the body again. The fire, the air, the water, the earth, and the aether; you cannot have these outside of Him. O, Kazi, O Pundit, consider ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... trees, which, growing, decaying, and dying like man, yet outliving him by centuries, seemed, like animals, to be both far below and yet far above him in many of the conditions of life. In those glowing climes the Banyan was regarded as the tree of trees, and the mighty centre of vegetating life. Hence it was worshipped with such deep reverence that even in modern botany we find it named the ficus religiosa; and it was called by the earlier ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... palm-hung pleasances Came through the lattice bars With scents and murmurous harmonies; Like splintered scimitars The moonbeams through the banyan trees ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... are offered in San Cristoval to a certain malignant ghost called Tapia, who is believed to seize a man's soul and tie it up to a banyan tree. When that has happened, a man who knows how to manage Tapia intercedes with him. He takes a pig or fish to the sacred place and offers it to the grim ghost, saying, "This is for you to eat in place of that man; eat this, don't kill him." With ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... bamboo, shooting to the height of sixty feet and upward, with branches gracefully drooping; the generous, kind banana; fairy forests of ferns of a thousand forms; tall grasses, with their pale and plumy blossoms; the many-trunked and many-rooted banyan; the boh, sacred to Buddha,—all combine to form a garden that Adam might have dressed and kept, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... drunken slumber of frenzy twice he drank to the lees, On the sacred stones of the High-place under the sacred trees; With a lamp at his ashen head he lay in the place of the feast, And the sacred leaves of the banyan rustled around the priest. Last, when the stated even fell upon terrace and tree, And the shade of the lofty island lay leagues away to sea, And all the valleys of verdure were heavy with manna and musk, ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inclined schists, and afforded magnificent blocks for the natives to rear on end, or make seats of. Some erect stones on a hill at the entrance are immensely large, and surround a clump of fine fig and banyan trees.* [In some tanks we found Hydropeltis, an American and Australian plant allied to Nymphaea. Mr. Griffith first detected it here, and afterwards in Bhotan, these being the only known habitats ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... not tell the character of the snake that had bitten me, but it was large and long, and many cobras are dark and lengthy creatures. My father shot one with No. 8, in the roots of a banyan tree this very year, and ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... first street, and then formed in order of procession, the escort leading. Presently a party of the king's linguists, with four large state umbrellas, ensigns of chieftainship, came up to request us to halt for a few minutes under the shade of a large banyan tree in the street, to give the king a little more time to prepare to receive us. After a brief delay of about twenty minutes, during which a large party of the king's soldiers fired a salute about a hundred yards distant from ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis |
