Note 10 — XII.—LEGENDS OF LOCALITY, HOUSEHOLD TALES, &c.

“Returning to this place on the following day he remarked a wonderful change, and that each eyelid had become a shrub; and the same which we now call tea, whose virtues and use were at that time as unknown as the plant itself. Dharma, on eating the leaves of this plant (fresh and green, for infusing them in water was unknown), found with astonishment that his heart was filled with extraordinary joy and gladness, and that his soul had acquired renewed strength and power to enable him to continue his godly contemplations. This event and the extraordinary virtues of the tea plant he immediately brought to the notice of a number of his disciples, together with the manner in which it was to be used.… And hence it comes that since that time to the present, the learned have made no remarks about it, and that some have considered it sufficient to attribute its origin to the eyelids of Dharma.” The translator shows however that tea was not unknown in China in the third and fourth centuries, so that the legend bears the impress of modern invention. Its existence is repudiated by modern Buddhist scholars, and it is essentially a mere vulgar tale. But, accepted as such, it is interesting in the hint it gives us of the Hindu myth, wherein the falcon who undertook to steal the heavenly Soma (drink of immortality) had a claw and a feather shot off by a demon arrow. They fell to the earth and took root, the claw becoming a species of thorn and the feather a palasa tree, the Indian representative of the rowan or mountain ash.10 The classic origin of the hyacinth (from the blood of Ajax), the growth of mint from the body of Minthe the mistress of Pluto, the almond tree which sprang from the corpse of Phyllis, and numerous other legends familiar to our schoolboy days all embody the same idea of the human body, or a portion of it, springing up anew in the shape of some member of the vegetable world.