What does the banyan tree symbolize in the Bhagavad Gita?

Chapter 15 of the Bhagavad Gita opens with one of its most striking images: an ashvattha, or sacred banyan/fig tree, described as eternal but growing upside down — roots above, branches spreading downward. Krishna tells Arjuna its roots reach up toward the Supreme, its branches extend down through the material world, and its leaves are the Vedic hymns; “one who knows this tree truly knows the Vedas.” The inversion is the point: ordinary perception treats the visible, downward-growing world of sense objects and desires as the stable, rooted reality, and treats the source above as remote or abstract. The Gita reverses that. The true root — the thing that actually sustains everything else — is the Supreme, not the branches of worldly life that look most solid and permanent from where a person stands inside them. Ashvattha itself carries a wordplay: it can be read as “that which will not remain the same tomorrow,” marking the whole structure as impermanent despite its apparent vastness. Verses 3–4 then give the practical instruction: “this deep-rooted tree must be cut down with the strong axe of detachment,” after which one should seek out that original root, “the Supreme Person from whom the eternal process began.” The image isn't a call to reject the world outright but to stop mistaking its branches — wealth, relationships, roles, outcomes — for the root that actually gives them their reality, and to trace attachment back to its source rather than getting lost pruning individual branches one at a time.