Lotus

The sacred lotus is Nelumbo nucifera, and its symbolism rests on something the plant actually does: it roots in mud at the bottom of still water and lifts an immaculate flower clear of the surface, its leaves and petals shedding water and dirt so completely that the self-cleaning effect is now studied by engineers as the lotus effect. That daily fact, purity emerging untouched from filth, is the whole of its religious meaning across South and East Asia, where it stands for spiritual awakening rising unstained through the world. The plant is also remarkably long-lived at the seed: lotus seeds have germinated after more than a thousand years, which reinforced its ancient association with rebirth and endurance.

The self-cleaning property named for the plant has become real modern technology: the botanist Wilhelm Barthlott, who first studied and named the effect in the early 1990s, showed the lotus leaf's microscopic waxy bumps prevent water and dirt from sticking, and the discovery has since been commercialised under the trademark Lotus-Effect and applied to self-cleaning paints, roof tiles and fabrics, a rare instance of a plant's ancient religious symbolism and its twenty-first-century industrial application resting on exactly the same physical fact.

In Hinduism the lotus (padma) is the seat and emblem of the great deities: Lakshmi sits or stands on one, Brahma is born from a lotus growing from Vishnu's navel, and the open flower is a standard image of the heart, the chakras and the manifest cosmos. Buddhism carries the image further, the Buddha's first steps are said to have brought lotuses from the ground, deities and enlightened beings are shown enthroned on lotuses, and the mantra Om mani padme hum sets the jewel in the lotus. The Egyptian flower usually called a lotus is properly a water-lily (Nymphaea), the blue and white lotus of Nile art, associated with the sun and rebirth because it opens at dawn and closes at dusk; it is a different plant from the Asian Nelumbo, though the two are endlessly conflated.

The lotus is the national flower of both India and Vietnam, a modern civic designation layered onto the older religious symbolism recorded above rather than replacing it, and in Vietnam in particular the white and pink lotus of the Mekong Delta carries a specifically national resonance alongside its Buddhist meaning, appearing on coinage, in poetry taught in schools, and as a common motif in state and civic emblems. The sacred lotus holds a genuine biological record: a lotus seed recovered from a dry lakebed at Xipaozi in China's Liaoning province and radiocarbon-dated to roughly thirteen hundred years old was successfully germinated, the longest-lived viable seed ever confirmed for any flowering plant.