Siththam karamin Lyrics by Dayan Witharana

Painting your face in my mind
until the day I see you again
Your voice, coming back to me echo upon echo
until it reaches my ears once more
After taking this life I was given to live, must I suffer through this whole existence

Your heart, wandering between two worlds
can’t be as shaken as mine
Because you are my entire world
the pain I feel must be greater
After taking this life I was given to live, must I suffer through this whole existence

Lost and found from one life to the next
through paramita (the perfections of merit) still left unfulfilled
Should we say goodbye now, we who once belonged to each other
hoping to meet again in some life to come
After taking this life I was given to live, must I suffer through this whole existence

Painting your face in my mind…

A young man is holding on to the woman he loves the only way he still can, by keeping her image alive inside his head. He says he will go on painting her face in his mind until the day he gets to see her again, and listening for the sound of her voice as it comes back to him in echoes, until it finally reaches his ears once more. They are apart, and he has no idea when or whether that day will come.

Underneath the longing runs a Buddhist way of looking at the world that any Sri Lankan listener will catch at once. When he asks whether he must “suffer through this whole existence,” the word he uses is bhava, one full term of life within saṃsāra, the long chain of births and deaths. The whole song stretches the ache of one separation across that scale. He measures his pain against hers and decides his must be worse, because while her heart wanders between two worlds and stays steady, she is his entire world, so losing her takes everything.

The last verse is where the song reaches for something larger than this single life. “Lost and found from one life to the next” is the Buddhist idea that the people we love drift in and out of our existence across many rebirths, found in one life, lost in another. The paramita he mentions are the perfections, the merit a being slowly fulfills over countless lifetimes on the way to release, and he calls theirs unfulfilled, as if their love still has a long road of births to travel before it is complete. So when he asks whether they should part now, he softens it immediately with a wish: that they meet again in some future birth. He is not letting her go so much as handing the two of them over to the long arc of saṃsāra and trusting it to bring them back together.

What stays with you is how quietly devastating that hope is. He is not promising they will be together in this life. He is asking the universe to remember them across lifetimes, which is both an act of deep faith and a way of saying that in the here and now there is nothing left to do but wait, paint her face in his mind, and endure.