October 28, 2026

Everything That Holds You Up

I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha, the best of all teachers, who taught that whatever is dependently arisen is unceasing, unborn, unannihilated, not permanent, not coming, not going, without distinction, without identity, and free from conceptual construction.

Nagarjuna, the second-century Indian philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism, opens his landmark treatise with this verse honoring the Buddha's teaching on dependent origination. He is describing a world where nothing has a fixed birth, death, or separate identity, because every single thing arises only in relationship with countless other things. This is the root of what later traditions across Asia called interbeing: a sheet of paper holds the rain, the sun, and the hands that cut the tree, if you look closely enough. Eastern contemplative practice turns this into daily training, tracing the hidden conditions behind a meal, a conversation, even a breath, until separateness starts to look like an illusion. Nagarjuna's point was never abstract: see the web clearly, and grasping at a solid separate self begins to loosen.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Interbeing →