This article centres on the Bodhi tree, aśvattha/pippala or Ficus religiosa, in Bodh Gaya, India. It analyses the tree as an assemblage by combining concepts from the ancient Buddhist Pali literature with recent interventions in new materialism and posthumanism. The text foregrounds the role of emotions in the relational cosmologies of both early South Asian Buddhist texts and contemporary general ecology, tracing how they connect the tree-as-assemblage with other human and nonhuman actors. This allows the article to recover an emergent agency in the assemblage, informing a re-examination of the tree’s role in the Buddhist reform movement in colonial India, specifically in its connections to the Anagarika Dharmapala and the Maha Bodhi Society. Besides its contribution to the history of Buddhism in colonial modernity, the article thus develops theoretical reflections on writing history beyond anthropocentrism by mobilising the potential of South Asian vernacular philosophies to speak to contemporary issues in philosophy and the Anthropocene at large.