Sunday, March 29, 2015

INTERDEPENDENCE, IN ESSENCE

Everything exists in relation to everything else, which is to say that nothing exists independently of other things.  In Zen Buddhism this is described as the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.  An image often used to illustrate this is a spider’s web at dawn.
 
The philosopher Alan Watts expressed it this way: “Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops.  And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops.  And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflection of all the other dew drops in that reflection.  And so ad infinitum.”

The Buddhist concept of dependent origination is related to this.  It states that all things arise in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions. 

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