Bountiful harvest

Source:Global Times Published: 2015-1-6 18:19:21

Prices of buddhi chitta seeds are soaring thanks to Chinese demand


Sange Lama, a buddhi chitta businessman, talks on the phone in his store in Kathmandu, Nepal on December 23, 2014. Photo: Sun Zhe


 
When Sange Lama was a child, he and his friends played with buddhi chitta seeds in their own kind of marble games.

A buddhi chitta tree can produce thousands of seeds, much more than villagers knew what to do with back then. Apart from those played with by children and given to monks to be made into prayer beads, the seeds were just thrown away as they were neither edible nor of any known medical value.
 
But the seeds have since spawned a growing business, and Lama is now a partner in buddhi chitta seed wholesaler Five-vow Import and Export, based in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. Buddhi chitta seeds have become a desirable item among collectors in China, and their prices have risen sharply since three years ago when they started to become popular.

Hot stuff

“Buddhi chitta is a new item for Chinese antique and artifact collectors,” said Yang Qi, a trader of Nepali seeds in Beijing.

Like walnuts and certain types of gourds that are small enough to be massaged in a palm and that change color over time, buddhi chitta seeds originally came into fashion among collectors. They are also becoming a hot area for investment, because their prices increase as they age and take on a good color.

Since almost all of his customers are Chinese, Lama has a Chinese national flag above the door, in order to welcome them.

The seeds are mainly sold to major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou, where the collectors gather, according to Hou Junjie, a 28-year-old man from East China’s Anhui Province who frequents Nepal to buy seeds and mala (a special type of product made of 108 seeds) for his clients in China.

The buddhi chitta and mala seeds are said to be able to amplify the effects of praying in Buddhism. In Nepali language, buddhi means “enlightenment”, and chitta means “soul”.

Tree of life

The buddhi chitta tree used to grow only in Timal, a district 80 kilometers to the southeast of Kathmandu that consists of 10 villages, but it has recently been cultivated in other areas due to the growing commercial potential of its seeds.

Timal is inhabited mainly by the Tamang people, one of Nepal’s main ethnic groups.

In Tamang folklore, the tree is a gift from Buddhist god Padma Sambhava, who introduced Vajrayana Buddhism, the oldest of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, into Tibet.

Timal means “big money” in the Tamang language, but it only started living up to its name after Chinese people fell in love with the buddhi chitta seeds.
Villagers from Timal used to make a modest living from farming, but some are now buying properties in Kathmandu, the most expensive city in the country, after making money from selling the seeds and planting more trees.

Trading buddhi chitta seeds has been profitable enough for Sange Lama not to regret having quit his college teaching job last year, but running the seed business is not easy.

For more than two months from May to June, the harvest season for the seeds, the six partners of Five-vow Import and Export take turns to camp under the trees seven days a week in order to stop people from stealing the seeds.

“You cannot keep your eye off the tree day or night,” said Lama’s uncle, who is another partner of Five-vow Import and Export. “You cannot trust anybody.”

Also, as the harvest season overlaps with the monsoon season, the job of watching over the trees is not an enjoyable experience for buddhi chitta dealers.
The buddhi chitta business usually involves partnerships of family members and relatives. In the case of Five-vow Import and Export, all the partners are from the same family.

How much?

Even a small seed with a good size and shape can be worth hundreds of rupees. And a 7-mm mala is priced at more than 1.5 million rupees (US$15,000 or 92,500 yuan) in China, even more than its weight in gold, according to Lama. The size of the seeds is something that buyers in China pay close attention to.
“A man carrying a 9-mm buddhi chitta seed is a rich man,” Lama said.

Even though the buddhi chitta trees are now being cultivated outside Timal, seeds from other areas are not considered to have the same quality, so traders still keep coming to Timal every year to buy fresh seeds.

Lama’s company does not own the trees. He and the other partners pick certain trees, based partly on the seeds they have produced in previous years, and then they prepay to harvest the seeds from their chosen trees.

Years in the business have sharpened their eyes and judgment, but competition for good trees is literally cut-throat. Lama said he knew of four traders who had died as a result of fights over trees.

In spite of the good business in the past three years, traders are also concerned about a potential slowdown in sales if the seeds become too expensive.
“The price is dangerously high,” said Yang, the trader.

Yang also trades rudraksha seeds, which are also used as prayer beads by Hindu believers, with individual seeds representing different gods or goddesses.
However, in China, rather than religious implications, the buddhi chitta and rudraksha seeds have certain auspicious meanings, such as fortune, health or happy marriages.

Rudraksha seeds are also becoming popular, with the price having increased threefold during 2014, said Yang.

The Lamas also trade in rudrakshka seeds in winter, which is the harvest season for them. They themselves have no idea why Chinese people have become so enthusiastic about buddhi chitta and rudrakshka seeds, but they are not worried about that. The only thing they are worried about, is that one day the seeds’ popularity might wane.



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