The Story of the Bo Tree

Once there was a prince who was confused about the world so he sat under a beautiful bo tree and fasted and had visions and many storms and things came after him but the snake god wrapped itself around the prince and protected him and when it was all over he knew that partying all the time was a nowhere road but so was staying in your apartment all the time and just working on projects. The key to enlightenment was being mediocre and balanced and nonextreme. He also said that life is pain and that pain is caused by the frustration of desire and they key to eliminating pain is to eliminate desire. He was a smart man.

This is a picture of the bo tree in Bodhgaya, India under which he found enlightenment (at least they say it's the same tree). Note the monks doing pushups:



This is a picture of a 27-year-old Sleepy E, back when he did stuff. E is the palefaced, very unenlightened lummox on the left:



This is a random picture of E at the Taj Mahal:



Even though there is a Vietnamese monastery directly across the street from my apartment building, it took me an entire year to discover this fact. Mainly it was because of big beautiful bo tree that concealed the templesque trappings and statues. I think a bo tree is technically a ficus, but I'm not sure what the exact make and model of it is. This is a picture of the monastery around the time Mid-B was here in May. You can see the bo tree encroaching in on the top left of frame:



This is the picture of the bo tree as about a week ago:



I came out one day and two guys were up on ladders chainsawing the thing up. I went over and asked what was going on and they claimed that the monestary called them out to do some "pruning." My guess is that the neighbors were complaining about the reach of the beautiful tree and the city was ordering them to contain it. So they brought in these guys to hack the s*** out of it. But this was delicate pruning, I hate to see the alternative.

"This is terrible!" I said. "Look at it, my God!"

"It'll grow back in about a year."

A few days later I was out taking pictures for the blog and a bald middle-aged monkstress came out to see what I was doing.

"They cut down the bo tree!" I said.

"No," said the woman.

I made furious cutting motions with my index and middle fingers. "The bo tree! They cut it."

"No," she said apologetically.

Maybe she thought I was trying sell her on the idea of some more pruning. I smiled and said goodbye and went back to my apartment to work on a novel with make-believe events in it.