Echoes of the Epiphyllum; Impermanence, Attachment, and the Journey Through the Human Realm.

Whenever I’m feeling sad over the threads of connection, loss and the persistent longing for permanence, I stop myself and think about the Epiphyllum. I found the concept of Epiphyllum is really interesting. So, I was reading The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn and one of the main characters, Alice, described it as “a white, exotic blossom opening slowly in a dark room, almost seeming to cast its own light…”, but another description for Epiphyllum is a flower famous for blooming only at night and withering by dawn.

The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn

Perhaps we can better understand this through conversation I had with a dear friend of mine. He recently went through a loss of love and questioned himself “whom did I wrong that I am now indebted to?”, he feels wronged to deserve such heartbreak. I believe many of us have felt this way at some point in our lives.

But, instead of making it “the need for the universe to make sense” to us, why don’t we view this as a “lesson” that our soul needs to learn? Yesterday, on May 30th, I met with another dear friend mine and had a meaningful 3-hr catchup session (full of laughter and tears, I love that!), she told me that our relationships with people are rarely random. In Buddhism, we are grappling with the karmic debts of the past. We are drawn to individuals to resolve past karmic conditioning. I realize that karma isn’t just about being punished, but it is also about us changing and growing.

The more I think about this the more it makes sense to me. As Haemin Sunim said in his book “The Things You Can See When You Slow Down”, that the world comes to exist when we are aware of it, that we cannot live in a reality of which we are unaware, that the world depends on our minds in order to exist, just as our minds depend on the world as the subject of our awareness. If we shift our mind to view the relationship through this lens of awareness, we’ll be able to see that the relationship wasn’t a random cruel act, but a mirror. The mirror is showing us that our mind is still attached, we still seek external validation and that we have yet to heal within ourselves. When we finally accept this lesson, the debt is cancelled. Our minds slow down and we’ll realize that the state where “no one owes anything” happens when we look at the person who hurt us and stop demanding an apology, closure, a rewrite of history. I personally think that true closure is realizing that the relationship gives us the exact awareness we needed to grow.

The grieving heart and tears that both the beauty of love and sting of its loss reminds me of Annica (Impermanence), it’s just temporary. Tears… whenever I feel hurt or sad, I’d just quickly wipe my tears and think of the Epiphyllum flower where its bloom at night is breathtaking, but it withers by dawn. It is just like Buddhism teachings that Dukkha (Suffering) arises not because things change, but because I desperately grasp onto them, wishing them to be static.

While we are reflecting on this, I’d recommend one song for you to listen to: 路过人间 (Waking by the World) by Yisa Yu. The song is so beautiful and it’s just so perfectly aligned with the philosophy, that we are all just “walking by” or “passing through” this human experience.