It is a large evergreen tree, often with buttress roots, and has leaves with wavy serrations, creamy white flowers and more or less spherical bright blue drupe fruit.

[8] In India, the cleaned pits of the fruit of this tree are known as rudraksha in the Hindi language (from Sanskrit: rudrākṣa, meaning "Rudra's teardrops" or "eyes") and are widely used as prayer beads, particularly in Hinduism.

Coode, Elaeocarpus angustifolius is a tree that typically grows to a height of 40 m (130 ft) and usually has buttress roots at the base of the trunk.

This may be an adaptation to becoming emergents in some habitats, or often growing in secondary woodland -buttress roots can better distribute tensile stress in the base of the tree transmitted down from wind in the crown.

[5] The stone at the centre of the fruit, technically a pyrena, is typically divided into multiple segments, which are locules, each usually bearing a seed.

[13] A study of the fruit and stones in Sri Lanka found that variation in characteristics such as size and colour were highly influenced by the individual trees, as opposed to season or location.

[15] E. grandis/angustifolius can, however, be told apart from other species of Elaeocarpus by having petals much divided at the apex; small, round fruit; 5-7 locules per stone; straight embryos; and glabrous leaves with even and fine serrations along their margins.

[19] In 1791, long before the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) rules had been formalised, in his book on the fruits and seeds of plants Joseph Gaertner renamed the genus from Elaeocarpus to Ganitrus again, arguing that as Rumphius had been the first to formally describe the species, his name should have taxonomic priority.

This is not what is known as 'good species'; it is a frankenstein, composed of the description of Johannes Burman's 1747 Elaiocarpus serrata and an illustration of the fruit and the seeds of Rumphius's Ganitrus Ganitri.

[11][18][20] Some taxonomists believed this invalidates the name altogether, in 1980 the French botanists Christiane Tirel and Jean Raynal stated that because Gaertner had cited Linnaeus's Elaeocarpus serrata, that means that the type was automatically that of Linnaeus's E. serrata (collected in Sri Lanka in the 1670s by the German-Dutch botanist Paul Hermann for his 'Ceylon Herbarium', bound volumes of actual plant specimens, also later published as a list).

For example, the name Elaeocarpus angustifolius was first introduced in 1825 by the again German-Dutch Carl Ludwig Blume in his book Bijdragen tot de Flora van Nederlandsch Indie from material collected in the "mountains of Buitenzorg Province".

In 1925 George Don's rather unscientific, but quite complete, 1831 gardening dictionary A General History of the Dichlamydeous Plants was rediscovered, and Roxburgh's name is now considered first validated in this work.

[26][30] Of the nine Elaeocarpus names Roxburgh invented for the plants in the Calcutta garden, Don dismissed all of them as impossible to identify and probably just synonyms of species which had been described before by others, except for E. rugosus and E. ganitrus, for in the last case he recognised that the specific epithet meant it must be same plant as that of Rumphius almost two centuries earlier, supplied a summary description of it in his work and gave Ganitrus Ganitri as a synonym of Roxburgh's name.

[21] In the 1895 issue of the influential series Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien, Karl Moritz Schumann classified the genus Elaeocarpus into four sections.

In 1984 Coode regarded the taxon E. grandis as a synonym of E. angustifolius in his work Elaeocarpus in Australia and New Zealand, as it does not differ morphologically from the widespread and quite variable E.

[2] It was thus entered into the 2014 Atlas of Living Australia, which led it to be recognised again by the Plants of the World Online website as of 2022, despite Rafaël Govaerts noting the synonymy in 2001.

[37][38] E. macdonaldii is another possible synonym from Vanuatu described by Ferdinand von Mueller in 1893, which is/was missing from the Index Kewensis, but it may no longer be identifiable.

[13] It is classified in the Ganitrus group of the genus Elaeocarpus, along with E. altisectus, E. avium, E. buderi, E. dolichostylus, E. fulvus, E. kaniensis, E. ornatus, E. osiae, E. ptilanthus, E. ramiflorus and E. trichopetalus.

[13] This species has a wide distribution stretching from the Himalayas in Nepal and India east to China and the Philippines, and south to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

[39] In New Caledonia it occurs across Grande Terre (from Prony Bay to Poum), the Isle of Pines (île des Pins) and the Loyalty Islands (Lifou, Maré, Ouvéa).

[43] Note that the plants in Hawaii were introduced from Australia[8] and may technically actually be E. grandis, although this is a moot point if these two names are synonyms.

[44] Coode writes in 2010 that E. joga, and its pro parte synonym E. carolinensis, needs to be re-examined (it falls outside the purview of his paper) to see if it truly is an independent species and not a synonym, and to which section of the genus Elaeocarpus it belongs -like E. grandis, if it belongs to section Ganitrus this is a biogeographic oddity, all other species appear to have evolved in the Malay Archipelago.

[9][6] It was also formerly thought to occur in Queensland, but the Australian Plant Census states that the trees from this area were in fact E. grandis, according to them the name E. angustifolius was misapplied pro parte.

[41] Writing from Ambon Island in the mid 17th century, Rumphius described that the fruits are gladly eaten by large birds, mentioning that especially wreathed hornbills can be found feeding upon them.

[16] E. angustifolius was found to be one among a few dozen species of relatively large-fruited rainforest plants eaten by double-wattled cassowaries in northern Australia.

Although seeds which are dispersed in cassowary dung do germinate, the percentage is quite low in Elaeocarpus as compared to other rainforest species eaten by the giant birds.

[52] Hundreds of years ago this plant was an important article of international commerce, specifically, the burl-like stones containing the seeds.

Rumphius describes that it was common practice across the islands of the Indonesian archipelago to trade in the stones, known as ganiter or ganitris in Malay, Javanese and Balinese -words known across the East Indies.

A hole could be bored through them, and the stones could then be stringed up into chains, which were worn around the body in the same manner as European people do with corals in rosaries.

The richest of the priests would string a golden nugget after every two ganiters, thus the Chinese called the stones kimkungtsi -'gold hard seeds'.