Contemplate interbeing in one ordinary object

Look at a single thing — a sheet of paper, a cup of tea — until you can see the cloud, the forest and the people that are in it.

Pourquoi ça marche

Interbeing is the word Thích Nhất Hạnh coined, during a retreat at Tassajara Zen Center according to his biography, to render dependent co-arising: the early teaching that “when this exists, this comes to be.” The Plum Village biography records his instruction to look with the eyes of interbeing and see that there cannot be a sheet of paper without clouds, forest and rain. Tracing an object’s conditions outward turns an abstract doctrine into a perception, and the perception has an ethical edge: if the paper is made of the forest, the logger, the rain and oneself, then harm and care do not stop at the edge of the self. The Fourteen Trainings call interbeing not a theory but a reality that can be directly experienced.

Comment faire

1. Take one ordinary object you can hold — a sheet of paper, a piece of fruit, a cup of tea — and rest your eyes on it for a few breaths.
2. Ask what had to exist for it to be here: for paper, the tree; for the tree, rain and soil; for the rain, the cloud.
3. Keep tracing: the people who cut, carried, made and sold it, and what fed them; let each condition become a picture rather than a word.
4. Notice that you are among its conditions too — your hands, your attention, your reason for picking it up.
5. Close by asking one practical question: what does seeing this object this way change about how I will use it, or treat the people in its chain?

Données probantes

The coining of “interbeing,” its link to dependent co-arising, and the paper-without-clouds image are recorded in the Plum Village biography, which cites his book The Other Shore (2016); the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings open by describing interbeing as directly experienceable. The underlying formula of conditionality appears in the discourses, for example Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.21. Sallie King identifies interdependence as one of the key principles behind socially engaged Buddhism. Support is textual and practitioner-based; no study has tested this contemplation. (anecdotal)

Thích Nhất Hạnh himself taught that interbeing is a skilful notion, not an ultimate truth to hold on to — his biography quotes him comparing it to a spade put down once the well is dug. The contemplation is meant to open perception, not to become a new doctrine to defend.

Sources

• Plum Village. Thich Nhat Hanh: Full Biography. plumvillage.org.
• Plum Village. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing (revised version presented by Thich Nhat Hanh, February 2012). plumvillage.org.
• Sujato, B. (trans.). The Ten Powers (Dasabalasutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.21). SuttaCentral.
• King, S. B. (2009). Socially Engaged Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Erreur fréquente

Turning it into a pleasant idea — “everything is connected” — without actually tracing the chain; the practice works through specific, pictured conditions, and stops working the moment it becomes a slogan.