Ase Mathuwana Lyrics by Amaradeva

Taking the teardrops that well up in my eyes,
I will wash your sacred feet.
Taking the wildflowers that sway in my heart,
I will offer them at your sacred feet…

You left behind the city full of the flower of defilements,
and went into the forest to deepen your meditation…
I have come searching across the face of this earth…
when I had no refuge left at all,

Taking the teardrops that well up in my eyes……

Piercing the deep blue sky above,
your great Buddha-form rises…
It has cast a spell over my eyes and my mind…
and made me see how small I am

Taking the teardrops that well up in my eyes……

This is a Buddhist devotional song, the words of Mahagama Sekara set to Amaradeva’s music. It is not a love song or a story. It is a devotee standing before the Buddha and pouring out everything he has to offer, which turns out to be almost nothing but his own tears and his own humility.

The opening sets the whole tone. The singer has no gold, no fine flowers, no grand gift to lay at the Buddha’s feet. So he offers what he does have. He says he will take the teardrops welling up in his eyes and use them to wash the Buddha’s sacred feet, and take the “wildflowers that sway in his heart” and offer those instead. Those wildflowers are not real flowers, they are the simple, unpolished feelings of devotion growing in him. In Sri Lankan worship you bring flowers to the temple and lay them at the Buddha’s feet, so the singer is taking that everyday act and turning it inward, his tears are the water, his heart’s feelings are the blossoms.

The middle verse remembers who the Buddha was. He calls the world “the city full of the flower of defilements,” meaning the ordinary human life crowded with craving, anger and delusion, the things that bloom in us and trap us. The Buddha walked away from all of that and went into the forest to meditate and find the truth. And the singer says that he himself has wandered the whole earth searching, and it was only when he had no refuge left anywhere, nowhere else to turn, that he came to this. That line carries the quiet ache of the song. Devotion here is not casual, it is what a person reaches for when everything else has run out.

The last verse lifts the eyes upward. He pictures the towering form of the Buddha rising right through the deep blue sky, vast and serene, so overwhelming that it puts his eyes and his mind under a kind of spell. And standing in the shadow of that greatness, he finally feels his own smallness. That is the resolution the song is after. It is not sadness for its own sake, it is the humbling that devotion brings, the moment a person sees how little they are next to something so great and offers up the only honest gift they have, their tears and their open heart.