Seed and Tree: 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Latent Capacity

In Bahá'í World Faith, the 1943 American compilation of selections from the Bahá'í writings, 'Abdu'l-Bahá uses the simplest of garden images to teach one of His most encouraging doctrines.

Consider; we plant a seed. A complete and perfect tree appears from it, and from each seed of this tree another tree can be produced … each one of us may become expressive or representative of all the bounties of life to mankind.

The image is one any child can follow. A small dry seed is placed in soil. It does not look, on the day of its planting, like much. The years of growth begin slowly: a sprout, a sapling, a young tree, a mature tree. Each year the tree gives more — a little shade, a few flowers, the first small fruit, then full crops of fruit. Inside each fruit are seeds. Each of those seeds can become the same kind of tree.

The arithmetic is generous. One seed, planted, becomes one tree. That tree produces, over the years of its life, hundreds or thousands of seeds. Each of those seeds, if planted, becomes another tree. After several generations, a single original planting has produced a forest.

The Master's application is direct. Each one of us, He says, is in the same position as that first seed. Each one of us may become expressive or representative of all the bounties of life to mankind. The capacity is in us already. What is required is the planting — the placement of the soul into the kind of soil where it can grow. Prayer is part of that soil. Service is part of it. Study of the Word is part of it. Companionship with other seekers is part of it. Slow and patient inward effort over many years is the rest.

The teaching cuts against two tempting errors. The first is to imagine that what one is now is what one will always be. The seed does not look like a tree, but it is, in its capacity, a tree. The second is to imagine that growth is for somebody else — for the obviously gifted, for the apparently chosen, for the visible saints. The Master will not allow that division. Each one of us — the modest, the obscure, the late-arriving, the convinced of one's own smallness — has been given the same kind of seed. The fruit, in time, can be the same.

The Bahá'í community has, over a century of small individual plantings, become a forest of which the original seeds — Tihrán, Shíráz, Baghdád, 'Akká — could not have dreamed in detail. The arithmetic the Master sketched in this short Tablet is the quiet mathematics that has carried the Faith into every nation.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in Bahá'í World Faith (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1943). Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19239.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1943). *Bahá'í World Faith*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19239