The Western world loves the idea of soulmates. One person, somewhere in the world, who is your perfect match. Destiny has chosen them for you. Your job is to find them, and when you do, everything falls into place.
It is a beautiful story. It is also, from a Buddhist perspective, a story built on several misunderstandings about how the universe works.
The Problem with Destined Love
The soulmate concept assumes a cosmic designer: someone or something that has matched you with another person and arranged the universe so that you will eventually meet. Whether that designer is God, fate, or “the universe,” the logic requires an external force that has a plan for your romantic life.
Buddhism does not operate on this assumption. There is no cosmic matchmaker. There is no script. There is no divine plan that guarantees you will meet your perfect person if you just believe hard enough.
This might sound bleak to someone raised on romantic comedies. But before you close the tab, consider what Buddhism offers instead. It is, in my view, more interesting, more honest, and ultimately more romantic than the soulmate narrative.
En (縁): The Web of Connection
The Japanese word “en” (縁) is one of the most beautiful and useful concepts in Buddhist thought, and it has no clean equivalent in English.
En refers to the web of causes and conditions that brings people together. It encompasses karma, circumstance, timing, history, and the countless small factors that had to align for two specific people to meet at a specific moment.
Think about any important relationship in your life. Trace the chain of events that led to your meeting. If you had taken a different job, attended a different school, walked down a different street, or been born ten years earlier, you would never have met. The chain of causes stretches back far beyond anything you can trace. It involves not just your choices but the choices of your parents, their parents, and an essentially infinite web of prior conditions.
En says: this meeting is not random. But it is also not fated. It is the natural result of an unfathomably complex web of causes and conditions. Every meeting has its reasons, but those reasons are not the product of a designer’s intention. They are the product of everything that came before.
Ichigo Ichie: This Meeting, Only Once
Connected to the concept of en is the phrase “ichigo ichie” (一期一会), which comes from the Japanese tea ceremony and means “one time, one meeting.” Every encounter is unique and unrepeatable. Even if you see the same person every day, each meeting happens under different conditions: different moods, different weather, different light, different thoughts in each person’s head.
This concept adds a quality of reverence to relationships. If every meeting is unrepeatable, then every meeting deserves your full attention. The person sitting across from you right now will never be exactly this person in exactly this moment again. That awareness, when it is genuine, transforms how you treat people.
It also releases you from the soulmate trap. You do not need destiny to make a relationship special. The sheer improbability of this particular meeting, in this particular moment, between these two particular people, is already miraculous enough.
Love Without Clinging
Buddhism does not oppose love. The Metta Sutta (the Buddha’s discourse on loving-kindness) describes a love so expansive that it includes all living beings without exception. This is not the possessive, exclusive love of romantic attachment. It is something bigger.
But Buddhism does not prohibit romantic love either. What it warns against is confusing love with attachment.
The difference, as discussed elsewhere on this site, is between holding someone in your open palm and gripping them in your fist. Love says, “I cherish you.” Attachment says, “I cannot survive without you.” Love says, “I want you to be happy.” Attachment says, “I need you to make me happy.”
When attachment dominates a relationship, it creates a particular kind of suffering. You become terrified of loss. You try to control the other person. You build your identity around the relationship, so that any threat to the relationship feels like a threat to your existence.
Non-attached love does not eliminate the pain of loss. If someone you love leaves or dies, it will hurt. But the pain is cleaner. It is the pain of loss, not the pain of a collapsing identity. You grieve, and then you continue, because your sense of self was never built entirely on one other person.
What About Past Lives?
Some Buddhist traditions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, do believe that people can have karmic connections that span multiple lifetimes. This is sometimes interpreted as a form of soulmate belief: “We have been connected before, in past lives.”
This is a legitimate Buddhist teaching in certain traditions, but it carries important nuances. The connection across lifetimes is not a guarantee of romantic bliss. Karmic bonds can be positive or negative. They can bring you together to learn something, to resolve something, or to work through something difficult. A past-life connection is not the same as a divinely ordained happy ending.
In Zen, which is the tradition I practice, past lives receive less emphasis. The focus is on this life, this moment, this relationship. Whatever brought you together, the question that matters is: how do you treat each other right now?
A Different Kind of Romance
The Buddhist view of love and connection is not less romantic than the soulmate narrative. I would argue it is more so.
Consider: which is more moving? The idea that a cosmic designer paired you with someone, like matching socks from a drawer? Or the idea that an incomprehensibly vast web of causes and conditions, stretching back through countless generations, converged at exactly the right moment for you to meet this particular person, and that this meeting will never happen again in the entire history of the universe?
The first version gives you certainty. The second gives you wonder. And wonder, I think, is a better foundation for love than certainty will ever be.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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Is the “red thread of fate” a Buddhist concept?
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The red thread legend (unmei no akai ito) is a popular folk belief in East Asian cultures, including Japan and China. While it is sometimes associated with Buddhist ideas about karmic connection, it is actually more closely related to folk mythology and Taoist imagery than to formal Buddhist teaching. Buddhism recognizes karmic connections between people but does not teach that a specific red thread ties two destined lovers together. The concept is better understood as cultural mythology that coexists with Buddhist thought rather than being derived from it.
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Does Buddhism say that love always leads to suffering?
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No.
Buddhism says that attachment leads to suffering, and romantic love often involves attachment. But love itself, particularly the expansive love described in the Metta Sutta (loving-kindness), is considered one of the highest qualities a human being can cultivate. The practice is not to avoid love but to love without clinging, to care deeply about someone’s happiness without making your own identity dependent on the relationship.
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How does the concept of en apply to friendships and non-romantic relationships?
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En applies to all human connections, not just romantic ones. The friend you met in high school, the colleague who became a mentor, the stranger who helped you when you were lost: all of these meetings are the result of the web of causes and conditions that Buddhism describes. In Japanese culture, the awareness of en extends to business relationships, teacher-student bonds, and even brief encounters with strangers. Any meeting where something meaningful happens can be understood as the flowering of en.
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