Padma: The Seat of the Gods, the Mind of the Buddha

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.