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Flowers are given as offering to divinity, especially in Buddhism. A visitor of the temple buys flowers at the entrance. He is then given a small tray that he will return to the merchant on his way out; he tends the flowers to the Buddha inside the temple and places the flowers on a table, the table of offerings. These flowers are always cut flush with the sepals (in contrast to the stems of a bouquet that lay lengthily and are therefore unattractive). Thematically, this is the very opposite of offerings: blood, fat, i.e. victim. Rather, the presenting of flowers conjures a religion without a victim, and strictly speaking, it can thusly not be a religion but only a ritual that stems from elsewhere, but where? Indeed, in ancient religions, in Judaism and even Christianity the offering is of the living flesh (la vie carnée: "This is my blood, my body," etc…).

The gathered flowers become an object embedded in a symbolic order. This gathering opens up a classic paradigm of scarcity / abundance. On the one hand, the profuse, abundant and overflowing bouquet. The sheaf connoting with expenditure, the Feast, the Potlatch. On the other hand, the unusual and elliptic bouquet that recalls a mythology of the gift of children, the small bouquet of violets - as a symbolic gesture coded as humility and discretion - and especially the bouquet in Zen, namely the ikebana: a rarity animated by a whole complex of symbolism. Etymologically, "bouquet" (bosquet, a grove) indicates the composite and the few. Here are, in fact, two contrary themes of essence: the essence of the fullness, the infinite, the inexhaustible in contrast to the essence represented by the rare, the thin, reduced to the essential thinness of things.

In Xenophon's The Economist, gardens are described as paradises. In Greek, Hoi paradesoi means "the parks", "the paradise". In Avestan, pairidaeza indicates the large oriental gardens of the Persian king. Undoubtedly, representing a climatic optimum, "paradise" originated in warm regions and its image contrasts with the extremities of climates. The garden is then an un-natural luxury, a privilege of the Lord and an object of enjoyment of high class. Flowers are the very being of luxury, of a supplement: that what is beyond or below the useful fruit. A flower can only be taken within an economy of luxury, however modest.

Isn't a flower an actual colour? A colour, however, is something that would be of the order of the impulse, of the drive. The flower is an offering or a civilised figuration of the drive: a sensitive, fragile and perishable impulse. The meaning of the flower may reach us from its uselessness as a thing - in contrast to a fruit. The essence of the flower may also stem from its rarity (according to the climatic conditions), and as something colourful and therefore instinctual.

Existence alludes to this supplemental aspect. In Latin, existere/exsistere would mean to "stand forth, appear," and, as a secondary meaning, to "exist, be;" from ex- "forth" + sistere "cause to stand" as in to "assist". Perhaps existence is thusly an event despite of itself. Not only is "Life" but also existence all together a generosity; an event opposed to "economic" obligations, an instance given with no eye to what will be partitioned in return. It is an asymmetry that involves a loss that does not incur a debt on the benefactor, and so does not open up a circle of reciprocal obligations: "if the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain uneconomic". A flower doesn't make sense.