Buddhism Interconnectedness Quotes

In Buddhism, the word “emptiness” is a translation of the Sanskrit sunyata. It means “empty of a separate self.” It is not a negative or despairing term. It is a celebration of interconnectedness, of interbeing. It means nothing can exist by itself alone, that everything is inextricably interconnected with everything else. I know that I must always work to remember that I am empty of a separate self and full of the many wonders of this universe, including the generosity of my grandparents and parents, the many friends and teachers who have helped and supported me along the path, and you dear readers, without whom this book could not exist. We inter-are, and therefore we are empty of an identity that is separate from our interconnectedness.

Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs. In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production. Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal. Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occupation. They provide employment to many people in their factories, newspapers, insurance firms, and supermarket chains, yet their financial success is an empty happiness because it is not motivated by understanding or compassion. Caught up in their small world of profit and loss, they are unaware of the suffering and poverty in the world. When we are not int ouch with this larger reality, we will lack the compassion we need to nourish and guide us to happiness. Once you begin to realise your interconnectedness with others, your interbeing, you begin to see how your actions affect you and all other life. You begin to question your way of living, to look with new eyes at the quality of your relationships and the way you work. You begin to see, 'I have to earn a living, yes, but I want to earn a living mindfully. I want to try to select a vocation not harmful to others and to the natural world, one that does not misuse resources.' Entire companies can also adopt this way of thinking. Companies have the right to pursue economic growth, but not at the expense of other life. They should respect the life and integrity of people, animals, plants and minerals. Do not invest your time or money in companies that deprive others of their lives, that operate in a way that exploits people or animals, and destroys nature. Businesspeople who visit Plum Village often find that getting in touch with the suffering of others and cultivating understanding brings them happiness. They practise like Anathapindika, a successful businessman who lived at the time of the Buddha, who with the practise of mindfulness throughout his life did everything he could to help the poor and sick people in his homeland.

A comprehensive ancient African world view based on the values of intense humanness, caring, sharing, respect, compassion, and associated values, ensuring a happy and qualitative human community life in the spirit of family. Broodryk anticipates our next question: “It may be asked whether this notion is unique,” he writes, “since all cultures ascribe basically to these positive values.” He’s right, of course—if we think of ubuntu as, say, “human interconnectedness,” there are parallels in Buddhism, or the Hindu concept of dharma. The difference, he says, is that in Africa “these values are practiced on a much deeper level. It is about a real passionate living of humanity, as if humanity is the primary reason for living above all other concerns.

Thus, once you have adopted such an attitude of infinite interconnectedness, you naturally want to liberate not just yourself but all beings from suffering. The Buddha calls this „the conception of the Spirit of Enlightenment“ it is the soul of the Bodhisattva, the person who dedicates him- or herself to helping all beings achieve total happiness. When you open to the inevitability of your infinite interconnection with other sensitive beings, you develop compassion. You learn to feel empathy for them, to love them, to want their happiness. You want to keep them from suffering, and you do so just as if they were a part of you. You don‘t think your behavior makes you special. You don‘t congratulate yourself for helping others, just as you wouldn't congratulate yourself for healing your own legs when you hurt it. It is natural for you to love your leg because it is one with you, and so it is natural for you to love others. You would certainly never harm another being. As the great Buddhist adept Shantideva (eighth-century Indian sage) wrote, „How wonderful will it be when all beings experience each other as limbs on the one body of life! (p. 27)

What binds Buddhism, Sufism, and Quaker practices together is a belief in our interconnectedness; profound respect for others; being guided by a greater good beyond material possessions, status, and image; valuing silence and stillness of the mind; acceptance of differences; developing inner awareness of one’s perceptions and motivation; commitment to service; and seeking guidance from within.

But just across the U.S. border, up in the tar sands of Alberta, there is another equally horrific image. A gaping pit, an abyss on its way to becoming the size of Florida, exists where Imperial Oil -- the largest company in the world -- is using the wild Athabasca River to pressure-wash underground sand formations that they gouge up like honeycombs, using huge amounts of energy and clean fresh water to steam the oil from those sands. Native people in the area are dying from drastically abnormal incidences of rare cancers, and Imperial Oil is seeking to transport more giant mining equipment -- on trucks over two hundred feet long and three stories high-- up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho, along the same route where the Nez Perce tribe rescued Lewis and Clark and directed them to the Pacific, shortly before the U.S. betrayed the Nez Perce and chased them toward Canada before killing them. (Rick Bass)

Nevertheless, critiques of karma often center on this notion of individual responsibility and suggest it produces an unsympathetic attitude toward others and leads to a dubious tendency to blame. The poor are blamed for being poor, and so on. Buddhism is said, falsely, to assign fault to individuals for all their circumstances and to deny agency. If we are poor, for instance, it might be thought, more or less automatically, that we will stay that way until our karmic debt runs out, and then, after we die, we may then be reborn in fortunate circumstances, becoming a wealthy entrepreneur perhaps. This type of thinking cannot be reconciled with Buddhism’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of all things though, which fully acknowledges the fertile complexity of influences on persons, including their environment.

With its philosophical insight into the interconnectedness and thoroughgoing interdependence of all conditioned things, with its thesis that happiness is to be found through the restraint of desire in a life of contentment rather than through the proliferation of desire, with its goal of enlightenment through renunciation and contemplation, and its ethic of non-injury and boundless loving-friendless for all beings, Buddhism provides all the essential elements for a relationship to the natural world characterised by respect, care, and compassion.

We all have the ability to walk out of the gloomy prison of self-limiting, uncritical existence into the bright daylight of a boundless, deeply meaningful, and tremendously satisfying existence, with its attendant playful, exuberant, joyous wisdom. The infinite life is life unbound by time or space. Deaths are only doorways, transitions from one life-form to the next, just as sleep is only a passage from evening to a new day. Your every movement of body, speech, and mind arises from a beginningless past and resonates into an endless future. You are free and boundless in dimension, and also very real and unique. You are lost in oneness with the awesome infinite, yet you have infinite importance due to your total interconnectedness with all other beings. When self-centered and unhappy, you are a big problem for them, often engaged in life-and-death struggles. When enlightened, self-transcendent, boundlessly open, and truly happy, you can be the living solution to all their problems. Open your eyes and look at yourself carefully. Expand the concept of reality that you live by – your awareness of, and responsibility for, your own personal continuity. Everything you do now, your very breathing, flows from your sense of yourself as a living continuum and your drive to improve your state of being. You are a dynamic evolutionary process. There is no limit to how far you can develop positively into higher states of spirituality, understanding, love, happiness, and creativity. (p. 29)

I enjoy experiencing a taste of the feeling that I am infinite. But you have to risk going into a sphere where you can‘t quite remember exactly who you are. You have to negate it anytime you feel the „I“ emerging as a fixed, independent, absolute thing, and then negate it again. It‘s not that nonexistence is your final goal, but that you want to rid yourself of your habitual sense that you exist in a static way. This practice has its thrilling moments of revelation, its unsettling moments of doubt, its quiet moments of mindfulness – all of which add up to a continuous, ever-deepening, evolving flow of liberation. Your infinite life thus becomes grounded in the greatest virtue of all – wisdom. Your wisdom deepens constantly as you gain a deeper and deeper understanding of your own selflessness and your resulting interconnectedness with all other beings. You engage other people with generosity, sensitive and empathic justice, and invincible tolerance, forbearance, and forgiveness. With practice, you gradually erase the division between meditation and action until you are filled with endless joy and bliss. Your newfound freedom energizes your actions in daily life, and you become an inexhaustible source of the infinite life force. Your embrace of beings who feel lost and frightened and abandoned does not ruffle the surface of the great ocean of your happy, loving presence, as you unleash waves of dynamic effort to help them. (p. 72)

If Zen master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.

Today the mind has taken a turn towards an organic interconnectedness among all things in the apparent attempt to restore something in self-awareness that had been lost in classical scientific method and religious orthodoxy.