Summary
Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists independently: everything comes into being through relationships. The word was coined by the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, who founded the Order of Interbeing (Tiếp Hiện) in Saigon in 1966. His illustration: without cloud, rain and trees there’s no paper, so “the cloud and the paper inter-are”.
For him it restates Buddhist insights into emptiness and non-self, realised through practice – more than most borrowings of the word carry. It has travelled widely since: the writer Charles Eisenstein, for one, sets a ‘Story of Interbeing’ against a ‘Story of Separation’. Many Indigenous and ecological traditions hold related understandings under their own names.
Rationale
Our research kept pointing to one reorientation, away from separation and towards this. Wary of silver bullets, we treat it as an energy “worth following”, “in various different ways”, and never as a single story.