The five figs

The five are the fruits of five trees of one genus: umbara, the gūlar fig (Ficus glomerata); vaṭa, the banyan (Ficus bengalensis); pippala, the peepal (Ficus religiosa); plakṣa (Ficus infectoria); and kākodumbara, the small fig (Ficus oppositifolia). A fig is a flower turned inward, pollinated by an insect that enters and does not leave; the texts do not say that, but they say what it amounts to: the fruit is a house of small creatures. A pious person, Hemacandra says, avoids them even when hungry and with nothing else to eat.

In the older texts the figs are not counted among the common bodies, though a sixteenth-century Digambara writer takes the word udumbara as standing for them all. With the three ma-kāras they make the eightfold ban; the four vikṛtis entry has the rest of that.