Ethereal Flowers

 As you review the world with your perfect intelligence and compassion, it must seem to you like an ethereal flower of which one cannot say: it is born, it is destroyed, for the terms beings and non-being do not apply to it. Gautama, Buddha. THE LANKAVATARA SUTRA (p. 3). Independent. Kindle Edition. 

When I think of ethereal flowers, I am reminded of the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, which compares deluded mind to the floaters that appear on one's eyes. When we say it is not born, not destroyed, what do we mean? A delusional flower is not actually a "real" flower, so we can't speak of it needing water or soil, or other conditions to grow. In fact, because the flower is only an image we form in our mind, there are no causes and effects for it to happen. 

Now surely, this can't apply to everything, can it? After all, Buddhism doesn't deny that there are causes and conditions. However, what it does say is that the nature of cause and effect is more mental than we take it to be. David Hume, the British philosopher, was my first exposure to this idea, because he showed that causal relationships are more of a matter of customary association than they are actual "substances" that cause things to happen in the world. For instance, when I see a rock being thrown through a window and glass breaking, I imagine that this is a purely physical relationship, where the mass of the rock "causes" the window to shatter. But Hume suggests that from the purely mental point of view, we don't experience any cause or effect, only one event customarily preceding the other: I see a rock hitting a window, then see glass breaking. I then infer that the rock causes the glass to break. Causality, however, or the force thereof, is not directly observable.

We do plant seeds, and seeds become flowers, but we are only ever interacting with the flowers of our minds. Flowers, like any other form, depends on the mind to appear. This is why it's thought to be "ethereal". We need awareness to be able to recognize the flower as a flower, and give it a name, as well as distinguish it from other things in the environment. All these are purely mental acts, on top of which we project the notion of "I" (a subject) when we narrow our focus on an object.

More so, because the appearance of the flower is so mind-dependent, it cannot be said to be a separate thing that is "born" or "destroyed". Can thoughts or memories "give birth" or "die"? They don't have these properties, and therefore the flowers we perceive are also not born or destroyed. We might imagine that the image of a flower "dies" when we don't perceive it, but actually this is only a metaphorical expression to say that something "leaves" a scene or leaves the world. These metaphors don't apply to images, since images only appear once, then get superseded by other images. In a movie film strip, we similarly see this kind of constant change, which makes it seem as though there is one single image that forms the substance of the others, when in fact, it's all just a series of images put together. The mind "fills in" the rest.

By having a clinging and tenacious view of thoughts, we cling to happy things, sad things, likes, dislikes, and then imagine they are more pervasively real than they are. They start to take on a larger than life power over us, when in the end they are only the thoughts that we feed habitually. A good example is an addictive substance: we try to quit, but seeing the substance triggers a habit energy that seems to impel us toward it. Actually, these habits are only tendencies of the mind, which can easily be curbed by developing other habit energies. This is a little bit of why "ethereal flowers" are a common metaphor in Buddhist scriptures.