Thich Nhat Hanh Is Gone

I was just reminded that the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh died earlier this year, at the advanced age of 95. Indeed, he was advanced in many ways, including the ways that matter most. I don't know when I first encountered him and his concept of "interbeing" -- maybe it was the early 90s? -- but it made a big impression on me. Now is a good time to revisit the notion that we can't exist without everything else.

"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the pre-fix “inter” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too."

I shared another version of this teaching way back in 2016, graced with a great ink drawing from Judith Trepp.