Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Interbeing” is a new word invented by Thich Nhat Hanh, which he employs to explain the interconnectedness of all things in the universe. A sheet of paper, for example, is an interbeing as it is connected with a cloud through a chain of relationships. “Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper,” Thay wrote in The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Things that appear, to most people, totally unconnected—a sheet of paper and a cloud in this example—become connected with each other in a relationship which Thay calls “inter-are”.

Technically speaking, “interbeing” can be regarded as what mathematicians call a “binary relation”, a relationship established on a set of elements by pair-wise comparison of them, defined in this case on the set of all things in the universe, including our consciousness. It is not difficult to see that the binary relation of interbeing satisfies the three laws of reflexivity, commutativity, and transitivity. First of all, it is obvious that anything “inter-is” with itself, albeit in a trivial sense of that word. Thus, the binary relation of “interbeing” satisfies the law of reflexivity, namely, xRx, where the symbol R designates the binary relation of “interbeing”.

The binary relation of “interbeing” also satisfies the law of commutativity, namely, xRy implies yRx, for if one thing “inter-is” with some other thing, then the second thing “inter-is” with the first. By bringing three things into consideration now and examining the applicability of “interbeing” among the three pairs of two things that result from them, we can see that the binary relation of “interbeing” further satisfies the law of transitivity; namely, xRy and yRz imply xRz. In the above example, a cloud “inter-is” with rain and rain “inter-is” with trees, implying that a cloud “inter-is” with trees.

Given that the binary relation of “interbeing” satisfies the three laws of reflexivity, commutativity, and transitivity, it becomes a matter of logical exercise, aided by a modicum of poetic insight, to establish the interconnectedness of all things in the universe. Thus, roses and garbage “inter-are”, another favorite example used by Thay to illustrate the concept of interbeing. We can also appeal to P. B. Shelley (1792-1822) who employs poetic insight to express the same binary relation of “interbeing” in a poem entitled “Music”:

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed.

And that beloved’s bed, as we know, is the soil from which a new rose tree grows with a new set of rose leaves and flowers!

The genius of Thay as a teacher of Buddhist thought becomes quite evident when he skillfully employs the concept of interbeing to explain the idea of sunyata, or emptiness, which is probably the most profound teaching of the Buddha on the nature of reality in the world around us. In terms of the binary relation of “interbeing” introduced above, the Buddha’s words as recorded in Samyukta Agama—“the Middle Way says that this is, because that is; this is not, because that is not”—can be expressed as follows: that x exists in M, or the manifest world, implies that there exists y, different from x, such that xRy; x does not exist in M if there does not exist y, different from x, such that xRy.

By applying this binary relation of “interbeing” repeatedly to all the other elements that connect a sheet of paper to a cloud, we derive another of Thay’s favorite expressions: “A sheet of paper is made of non-paper elements.” This can be expressed as: xR(~x), where x stands for a sheet of paper, and (~x) for non-paper elements. A natural conclusion that follows from this logical exercise is that a sheet of paper—indeed any thing for that matter—does not exist as a separate and independent entity, and is therefore inherently empty.

The term “interbeing”, although it appears to designate something that lies in between being and non-being, is actually a word Thay invented to expound the Buddhist idea of the Middle Way. We must go beyond the concepts of both being and non-being if we are to understand the idea of emptiness. As he puts it in Beyond the Self: Teachings on the Middle Way: “The Middle Way goes beyond ideas of being and nonbeing, birth and death, one and many, coming and going, same and different.”

By going beyond our dualistic way of seeing things (either “something exists” or “something does not exist”), we are able to develop the right view to see things, not in the lokadhatu, or the manifest world where things appear to be born and to die and to exist independently of one another, but in the dharmadhatu, or the ultimate realm of things as they are. As we learn to see things as they are, it will become clear to us that there is neither being nor nonbeing, neither birth nor death.

Let us now go back in time—as time is conceived in classical physics—to 1798 when Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote a delightful poem titled “We Are Seven”. In this poem, Wordsworth writes about his encounter with an eight-year-old cottage girl:

A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death? 

Asked by the poet how many sisters and brothers she has, this little girl answers: “Seven boys and girls are we;/ Two of us in the church-yard lie,/ Beneath the church-yard tree.” The answer confounds the poet because two of the seven brothers and sisters are already dead and buried in the churchyard. To the poet who reminds her that only five boys and girls are left if two are buried in the churchyard, the little girl answers emphatically, “O Master! We are seven.” As far as this little cottage girl is concerned, two of the seven brothers and sisters who are buried beneath the churchyard tree are not dead, as she daily plays with them in the churchyard.

Can we reject this little cottage girl’s answer as a reflection of her ignorance and concur with Wordsworth that she knew nothing of death? What is more intriguing for us is to speculate how Wordsworth would have responded had she answered, “O Master! We are seven—seven interbeings.” The poet, to be sure, would have been even more confounded by this answer. On the other hand, we can easily imagine how Thay would nod approvingly with a smile on his face. It was this cottage girl with her innocence of a simple child, not the poet with his knowledge of a mature adult, who was able to see things as they are.

* Written in appreciation of Thay’s inspiring and insightful dharma talks he gave during the 21-day retreat, ‘The Science of the Buddha’, held at Plum Village, June 1 - June 21, 2012.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” This well-known last line of a poem titled ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by P. B. Shelley (1792-1822) illustrates the keen awareness the people living in a country like England develop of the passage of seasons. Before spring turns into lovely and temperate summer, “rough winds do shake the darling buds of May”, Shakespeare (1564-1616) writes in one of his sonnets. That summer, too, will soon be replaced by the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, as John Keats (1795-1821) writes in his poem titled ‘To Autumn’.

Those of us who live in places with four seasons cannot but be reminded of the passage of seasons as winter is followed by spring, spring by summer, and summer by autumn, observing changes taking place all the time in the world around us. The Japanese, like the British, are known for their keen awareness of the passage of seasons, which they have converted into their inclination—perhaps “passion” may be a better word—for writing poems about the constantly changing sceneries in the natural world since the days of Manyoshu (The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves). In the case of haiku, the subtlety with which one manages to insert a word about a season within seventeen syllables is regarded as a sign of high artistic achievement. Observing constantly changing sceneries, it is not surprising that the Japanese have converted the Buddhist philosophy of anicca into an artistic concept called mujo to express their felt sense that all things in the world exist in impermanence, including themselves.

Ono no Komachi, recognized as one of the Six Master Poets in Kokinshu (The Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern), expresses this mujo, or impermanence, that she felt as she watched the passage of seasons taking place in the world around her in the following waka:

Flowers have withered
And their color has faded
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in the world
Watching the long rains fall¹

As someone who is said to have been one of the most beautiful ladies in Japanese history, Ono no Komachi was reflecting on the withering of her own figure and shape and the fading of her own youth and beauty as well, while she watched spring coming to an end with the withering of flowers, which are cherry blossoms in this case, and the fading of their color.

Cherry blossoms in spring serve as a most visible reminder of the passage of seasons for the Japanese, not just to a poet like Ono no Komachi. Consider, for example, the following:

Flowers in spring
Cuckoos in summer
The moon in autumn
The snow in winter
Glistening and shivering²

These words in a waka composed by Dogen (1200-1253) seem to suggest that the founder of the Soto sect of Zen Buddhism in Japan was also keenly aware of the passage of seasons, as he matched each season with a word symbolizing that season. Is Dogen, with this poem, reminding us of the passage of seasons and, therefore, of the impermanence of all things in the world around us?

The answer is, “No”. Why not, then? Note that Dogen does not say, “Flowers have withered” as Ono no Komachi does; he simply states, “Flowers in spring”. Although written as a waka, Dogen’s verse is not saying that spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter. It is not, therefore, mujo, or the sense of impermanence, that Dogen is trying to convey to us. The four seasons and what the Japanese typically notice in the natural world as representing each of the four seasons are simply itemized in a manner that does not suggest any passage of time. What, then, is Dogen trying to convey to us with this poem?

The poem is actually Dogen’s way of expressing genjokoan, which means, according to Yasutani Roshi, that “the subjective realm and the objective realm, the self and all things in the universe, are nothing but the true Buddha-dharma itself.”³ As Dogen himself writes in Genjokoan, “We don’t think that winter becomes spring. We don’t say that spring becomes summer.”⁴ What Dogen means is that winter is just winter, spring is just spring, and summer is just summer. Each season, in other words, is just a dharma, a phenomenon in the natural world, to which we give a name to distinguish it from other phenomena. “Flowers fall.” We know that much now from Newton’s law of gravity. But we are not to infer from the falling of cherry blossoms, Dogen tells us, that spring will soon become summer. A season is, just as all the other dharmas in the universe are, a koan in the sense he redefines it in Genjokoan, a manifestation in itself of the Buddha-dharma: “It is just as it is.”

1. Translated into English by the author from the original Japanese version:「花の色は移りにけりいたずらにわが身世にふるながめせしまに」(小野小町)
2. Translated into English by the author from the original Japanese version:「春は花夏ほととぎす秋は月冬雪さえて冷しかりけり」（道元）
3. Hakuun Yasutani, Flowers Fall: A Commentary on Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan, Shambhala, 1996, p. 7.
4. Ibid., p. 104.