The Flowers Were Gone the Next Day

I often walk along the same street near my workplace during lunch.

It is an ordinary route: buildings, sidewalk, traffic, and plants along the way. I have walked it often enough that most days I do not pay much attention to what has changed.

Recently, though, the yellow flowers caught my eye.

They were blooming across the green plants beside the street, bright enough that I stopped and took a photograph. There was no particular reason behind it. I wasn't thinking about Buddhism or physics. I simply liked the way they looked.

When I came back later, I noticed that most of the yellow flowers were gone.

The plants were still green. The buildings were still there. The sidewalk looked the same. I was walking what I would normally call the same road.

But it wasn't quite the same.

I looked at the plants, then at the photograph I had taken earlier. In the photograph, the flowers were still there.

On the street, they were not.

At first the difference seemed simple: there had been flowers, and now most of them were gone.

But the plants had not disappeared with them. Their leaves were still green. Some parts of the scene had changed quickly enough for me to notice; others seemed almost unchanged.

Of course, the plants were changing too. So were the trees, the pavement, the buildings, the weather. Most of that change was simply too slow or too small for me to see during a lunch walk.

And I was changing as well.

We use the word *same* easily. The same road. The same tree. The same person. It is useful language. Without it, ordinary life would become impossible.

Still, looking at the photograph, I wondered what exactly I meant when I called this the same road.

The walk brought me back to *anicca*, the Buddhist teaching of impermanence.

Early Buddhist texts describe conditioned phenomena as impermanent—arising under conditions and being subject to change and cessation.

The flowers made this easy to see without turning it into an abstract idea.

They had bloomed. For a while they were there. Then most were gone.

But what interested me was not only their disappearance. It was everything that had allowed them to appear in the first place.

There had to be a living plant. Water. Light. Temperature. Soil. A season in which flowering was possible. Processes inside the plant that I could not see.

The flower I photographed looked like one small thing.

Its existence was not so simple.

That thought led me toward dependent origination, *paṭiccasamuppāda*.

One early Buddhist formulation says, in essence: when this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. It also gives the reverse: when this is absent, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.

So I do not take dependent origination to mean simply that "everything is connected." That phrase is attractive, but it can become so broad that it loses the precision of the Buddhist teaching.

What stayed with me was the attention Buddhism gives to conditions.

If I wanted to understand why the flower was there, the flower itself would not be enough. I would have to look at what allowed it to arise and what allowed it to remain for as long as it did.

The Lotus Sutra also came to mind, although I have to make a distinction here. The familiar dependent-origination formula comes from earlier Buddhist teachings; it should not be attributed to the Lotus Sutra. Chapter II of the Lotus Sutra, in the version associated with Kumārajīva's Chinese translation, does include cause, condition, result, and effect among the aspects through which phenomena are described.

They are not the same passage or the same teaching.

For me, the connection happened afterward, on that walk: the flowers led me from impermanence to the question of conditions.

Then my thoughts moved from plants to people.

A marriage changes too.

Two people can be very close at one point in their lives. Years later they may be closer still, or they may have grown apart.

Usually there is no single moment that explains everything.

There are words and actions. There is attention and silence. There are expectations, sometimes spoken and sometimes not. There is work, money, health, children, family, stress, affection, resentment, patience, conflict and forgiveness.

A husband's actions can affect his wife. Her response affects him. His response becomes part of what happens next, and so does hers.

That does not mean every difficulty can be traced neatly back to one person. Nor does it mean that a troubled marriage should be explained away as someone's karma.

Real relationships are more complicated than that.

I find it more useful to think about conditions.

A marriage may keep the same name for decades, while the relationship inside that name changes many times.

In that sense, it reminded me of the road.

The buildings can still be there.

The plants