Ancient texts treat plants as living, sentient beings — and in 1900 an Indian physicist demonstrated they respond to stimuli.
Beings exist in many forms — those born of moisture, of seed, of earth — and trees and plants are counted among the living, sustained by the same life-breath.
— Chāndogya & Aitareya Upaniṣads; Manu Smṛti 1.46–49
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose's crescograph experiments (c. 1900) showed measurable electrical and growth responses in plants.
A genuine, defensible parallel.
Long before botany, Hindu texts classed plants and trees among living beings — capable of pleasure and pain, participating in the same cycle of life as animals and humans. The Manu Smṛti even describes them as having inner awareness though 'enveloped by darkness.'
The striking modern coda is Indian: around 1900 the polymath Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose built ultra-sensitive instruments (the crescograph) and demonstrated that plants respond to light, touch, and injury with measurable electrical signals — pioneering work later vindicated by plant electrophysiology. The honest line: scriptures asserted plant life as a spiritual and ethical truth (grounding ahiṁsā and vegetarianism), not as an experiment. Modern science confirms plants are responsive and signalling — but 'feeling' in the sense of conscious experience remains scientifically open. The intuition that plants are fully alive, though, was right.