Jabarkan Buddhism dari Sala (pohon)

Buddhist tradition holds that Queen Māyā of Sakya, while en route to her grandfather's kingdom, gave birth to Gautama Buddha while grasping the branch of a sal tree or an asoka tree in a garden in Lumbini in south Nepal.

Also according to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha was lying between a pair of sal trees when he died:

The sal tree is also said to have been the tree under which Koṇḍañña and Vessabhū, respectively the fifth and twenty fourth buddhas preceding Gautama Buddha, attained enlightenment

In Buddhism, the brief flowering of the sal tree is used as a symbol of impermanence and the rapid passing of glory, particularly as an analog of sic transit gloria mundi. In Japanese Buddhism, this is best known through the opening line of The Tale of the Heike – a tale of the rise and fall of a once-powerful clan – whose latter half reads , quoting the four-character idiom  from a passage in the Humane King Sutra, .

In Sri Lanka, people used incorrectly to think that Couroupita guianensis was the sal tree of Buddhist lore.