"For Thich Nhat Hanh, nonviolence is a natural and necessary part of Buddhist religion. To understand his teachings, then, one must start with the most basic religious foundation: "In Buddhism the most important precept of all is to live in awareness, to know what is going on…to be aware of what we do, what we are, each minute." When we are totally mindful—in direct contact with reality, not just images of reality—we realize that "all phenomena are interdependent…endlessly interwoven." This is the foundation of Nhat Hanh’s approach, not only to nonviolence but to all of life. He calls it the principle of "interbeing." "In Buddhism there is no such thing as an individual." There is no such thing as a separate object, event, or experience, because no any part of the world can exist apart from all others. Rather, everything that looks like a separate entity is actually dependent on, and therefore interwoven with, something else. Everything (object, event, idea, experience, whatever) is made up of other things. Whatever appears to be an isolated "thing" is actually a combination of its constituent elements. These elements are the influences from the other things with which it is interwoven. And those elements, too, are made up of other combinations. The world is an endless web of combinations."
Hanh's definition of interbeing reminded me of the ideas of networks. In a network, everything is layered, compiled from other things and then put together to form the whole. Though it may seem like a solitary subject or thing, each network goes with the idea that everything is interconnected. Networks can be anything, ranging from the growth pattern of tulips to the world of Facebook. Not only do objects form to create one network, objects and people intersect from one to another, creating connections from network to network.
