The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya is not the original tree. The original tree — a sacred fig, Ficus religiosa — was cut down by Emperor Pushyamitra Shunga in the second century BCE, a fact recorded in Buddhist chronicles with the kind of detail that suggests the monks who witnessed it were not planning to forget. What stands today is a documented descendant: a cutting was taken to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE by Sanghamitta, the daughter of Ashoka, who planted it at Anuradhapura. A cutting from that tree was later returned to Bodh Gaya. The lineage is unbroken, recorded, verifiable. This is the closest thing to continuity that a living organism can provide.
The Mahabodhi Temple, which stands beside the tree, was built and rebuilt across fourteen centuries. The current structure — fifty-five metres tall, tapering to a decorated point — is principally the result of a nineteenth-century restoration by the Archaeological Survey of India, which is itself a kind of continuity: each generation deciding this site warrants the work of maintenance.
What happened here, around 528 BCE, is described differently across traditions. The Pali Canon records that Siddhartha sat under the tree and resolved not to move until he had understood the nature of suffering and the way through it. Other accounts add detail: the approach of Mara, the long night, the moment at dawn when something resolved. What all traditions agree on is the location. It was here. Under a fig tree. In what is now the Gaya district of Bihar, beside the Niranjana River.
The Tibetan pilgrims arrive in groups at four in the morning, when the temple opens, and sit beneath the tree in silence. The Japanese monks chant in the pre-dawn dark. The Thai pilgrims wrap the base of the tree in saffron cloth. Each tradition approaches the tree with a different posture, a different language, a different understanding of what the tree witnessed. Each one is certain the tree is significant.
We called the SKU Bodhi. Not Enlightenment, which is what the word translates to in most texts, but Bodhi itself — the Pali word that means both awakening and the tree under which awakening occurred. The two meanings are fused in the original language. You cannot separate the insight from the organism beneath which it arrived. The print on the Bodhi shirt is a fig leaf in fine line: the actual shape of the leaf, in the scale it grows, rendered as if observed at close distance.
It is not a symbol of Buddhism in the general sense. It is a leaf. Ficus religiosa. The shape of that leaf has not changed in two and a half thousand years. This is worth knowing when you hold it.