CONCEPT
Interbeing
Thich Nhat Hanh’s English coinage for the Buddhist teaching that nothing exists by itself—that every phenomenon is made entirely of phenomena that are not itself, that connection is not something added to existence but what existence fundamentally is.
Interbeing is the concept through which
Thich Nhat Hanh rendered the ancient Buddhist teaching of
pratityasamutpada—interdependent co-arising—into a word the modern West could use. His most famous illustration is a sheet of paper: look deeply at it, he said, and you see the cloud that became the rain that grew the tree that was the paper; you see the sunshine, the logger, the logger’s parents, the wheat that fed the logger. The paper is made entirely of non-paper elements. It inter-is with everything in the cosmos. Nothing stands alone. This is not mysticism dressed as physics; it is a rigorous claim about the nature of existence, with a sharp consequence: the separate, independent self—the bounded individual who exists first and only then enters into relationships—is an illusion. There are no separate things that later connect. There is only connection, all the way down, from which the appearance of separate things arises. Brought to bear on the AI age,