Legend of the Betel leaf

... and Sinhalese Customs:

by M. Kumarasinghe

Have you ever asked yourself why people break off the tip of the betel leaf before they begin to chew it? Most chewers do so today unconsciously as a habit, but the actual reason is the superstition that there is poison in the betel leaf tip.

Betel plays an important part in the customs of the Sinhalese people. Every important event in the villager’s life is marked by the appearance of betel.

Guests are invited to important functions such as weddings, with a sheaf of betel on festivals, elders in the family are greeted with betel when payment is made to the village native doctor or teacher or astrologer, the money is always given in a sheaf of betel. And a chew of betel was at one time considered very necessary to stain the lips of women.

Whatever we might think of the place of betel in our lives today the ancients certainly knew why they used it. An ancient Sanskrit work, the Hitopadesa, has enumerated the uses of betel chewing.

It says: “Betel is pungent, spicy, sweet, alkatine, astringent: a carminative, a destroyer of phlegm; a vermifuge; a sweetener of the breath, an ornament of the mouth a remover of impurities, a kindler of the flame of love, O friend! these thirteen properties of betel are hard to be met with even in heaven.

The superstition about the poison in the betel comes from the story that the betel leaf was brought to this world from the Naga Loka, the Cobra World where it first grew. How it came to the Naga Loka is explained to an interesting legend.

The Buddha was a hare in one of his incarnations. The gods wanting to see how sincere the hare was in the his religious devotions sent the God Sakraya to test him.

Sakraya came up in the form of a demon. He asked the hare for a meal, reminding him that he ate only roast meat. He also asked him to preach a sermon.

The hare did not know how to get roast meat in the jungle. The only meat he could think of was his own. But even then there was no fire in which he could roast himself.

Finally he told the demon that he would give him his own meat if he would build a mountain and make a fire close to it. He would jump from the mountain into the fire and while so doing preach the sermon.

But when the hare prepared to jump Sakraya prevented him and whisked him off to the realms of the gods. He had passed the test.

To commemorate this event Sakraya painted a likeness of the hare on the moon after which he threw the brush away.

This brush fell in the Naga Loka, the cobra world. Here the king of the cobras mistook the brush for something edible and swallowed it. He died, and on the seventh day his skin turned into creeper the betel vine, which was then called Nagavalli.