Flowers - Lily, Lotus, Pundarika ~ Triplicane - Homer, Tennyson !!!

 

Heard of Nelumbo & Lilium  !  “Lotus & Lily”  - everyone of us know that our  divyadesam got its name from the sacred pond full of lily flowers “allikkeni” in association of Sri Parthasarathi Emperuman becoming Thiruvallikkeni.  [see the last line too!!]

The Sanskrit word “Puṇḍarīka (पुण्डरीक) -  is a well-known Sanskrit word for the lotus, particularly the white lotus.”  Puṇḍarīka occurs in the Ṛgveda, and later Vedic texts and Upaniṣads use lotus imagery. The Atharvaveda and Chāndogya Upaniṣad, for example, use the lotus in imagery associated with the human heart.  And this gives the lotus one of its most enduring Indian ideas:

It grows in mud, rises through water, yet emerges unstained.

That became a natural metaphor for purity amidst worldly existence. The lotus is therefore not merely a beautiful flower in Indian literature. It becomes a metaphor for Lakshmi, Saraswati, Brahma, Sriman Narayana/ Krishna, the human heart, the eyes of the divine, beauty, purity and spiritual detachment.  There is long-standing association of the sacred lotus with divinity, immortality and purity in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Puṇḍarīkākṣa (पुण्डरीकाक्ष) means:

“He whose eyes are like the white lotus.”

The Mahabharata repeatedly uses Puṇḍarīkākṣa for Krishna. When we hear “lotus” in Western literature, the first great reference is usually Homer's Odyssey.

Odysseus and his men arrive at the land of the Lotus-Eaters in Book IX. The men who eat the lotus lose their desire to return home. Homer describes the food as so delightful that they no longer care about their homeland. This produced the famous Western expression: “Lotus-eater” = someone lost in pleasure, idleness or dreamy forgetfulness. And the idea has survived for nearly 3,000 years. But  Homer's lotus probably wasn't the Indian white lotus pictured here.

The Greek word lotos was used for several different plants. Scholars have debated whether Homer's lotus was a fruit-bearing shrub, an Egyptian water lily, or something else. The botanical identity remains uncertain.  In fact, Denys Page's famous study Folktales in Homer's Odyssey discusses precisely this question and distinguishes Nelumbo, the Indian lotus, from Nymphaea, the Egyptian water lily.  So there is a delightful possibility that the same word “lotus” in Indian and Greek literature does not always mean the same botanical plant.

Many centuries later to Homer, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote The Lotos-Eaters (1833), directly based on the episode in the Odyssey. Library of Texas A&M University

His famous opening atmosphere is:

“In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.”

And everything becomes languid, dreamy and seductive.

Tennyson transforms Homer's lotus into a symbol of escape from responsibility, weariness, labour and the demands of ordinary life. That is quite different from the Indian conception.

Indian lotus: purity, divinity, spiritual awakening, beauty.

Homer/Tennyson's lotus: forgetfulness, languor, escape, dreamy pleasure. 

There actually exists a small twist here. Lotus is Nelumbo nucifera; Lily is Lilium; and what we commonly call a Water Lily is neither a Lotus nor a true Lily. It belongs to the genus Nymphaea — another aquatic flower, botanically distinct from both Lotus and Lily.  .. .. and pictured here are beautiful White Lotus flowers.

Regards – S Sampathkumar

6.10.2026