INTERDEPENDENCE

Ji-ji muge in Buddhism refers to the interdependence, the mutual unimpeded, interpenetration of all things and events.  It is likened to a spider’s web, as Alan Watts describes: "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 reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so on ad infinitum. This is the Buddhist image of the universe."  A net of jewels is another description of it, called Indra's net. Another term for it is dharma datu.

Speaking for Vedanta, Christopher Isherwood explains how human egotism prevents us from seeing this interdependence. "Every time you desire, or fear, or hate; every time you boast or indulge your vanity; every time you struggle to get something for yourself, you are really asserting: I am a separate, unique individual. I stand apart from everything else in this universe.  But you don't, you know.  The scientist will agree with me that you don't.  Every living creature and every object are interrelated, biologically, psychologically, physically, politically, economically. They are all of a piece." This is to say nothing of the spiritual connection, in that everyone and everything is Brahman.

Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Picard says of interdependence, "The world of appearances is created by the coming together of an in infinite number of ever-changing causes and conditions. Like a rainbow that forms when the sun shines across a curtain of rain and then vanishes when any factor contributing to its formation disappears, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no autonomous and enduring existence. Everything is relation; nothing exists in and of itself, immune to the forces of cause and effect."

With this comes the Buddhist principle of Dependent Origination, cause and effect.  If this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises; if this is not, that does not come to be; from the stopping of this, that stops. There is a consequence to our actions, remembering that even inaction is action.  This makes all the more imperative what is called mindfulness in Buddhism. We must pay attention to our behavior.  What we do and do not do affects what everything else in the universe does and does not do, whether we are aware of it at the time, or ever aware of it.