TNH INTERBEING

 A

What you’re describing is very close to the core insight of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on “interbeing.”

In his framing, reality is not made of separately existing things that occasionally interact. Rather, each “thing” is a knot in a vast web of causes and conditions—so deeply interdependent that nothing can be said to exist independently, even for a moment.

Your example of the sheet of paper is the classic illustration he uses:

• the tree is in the paper

• the rain is in the tree

• the cloud is in the rain

• the logger, his life, the sun, the soil, history itself are all present in it

So “paper” is not an isolated object—it is a condensed expression of the entire cosmos of conditions that made it possible.

Interbeing in structured form

Aspect	Meaning in “Interbeing”
Ontology (what exists)	No isolated entities; only interdependent processes
Identity	A “thing” is a temporary intersection of conditions
Separation	Conceptual, not ultimate reality
View of self	The self is also interwoven with all non-self elements
Perception shift	From objects → to networks of co-arising relations

Key insight

What you called “interwoveness” is essentially the insight that:

To see one thing truly is to see everything that made it possible.

But there’s an important subtlety in his teaching:

Interbeing is not just poetic interconnectedness—it is also a critique of the habit of isolating things in thought. The mind slices reality into separate units for convenience, then forgets it did the slicing.

So the shift is not that things become connected (they already are), but that perception stops missing the connections.

Where it meets other traditions

• In Madhyamaka: this is closely aligned with dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda)—nothing exists from its own side.

• In Advaita Vedanta: the emphasis is more on nondual consciousness as the ground, whereas interbeing emphasizes relational co-arising rather than a single metaphysical substrate.

• In Zen Buddhism (part of Buddhism): it becomes directly experiential—seeing a leaf, a cloud, or a person without the mental habit of separation.

One concise way to express interbeing

If your earlier framing was “no resistance and no separate self,” then interbeing adds:

Not only is there no separate self—there are no separate things to begin with, only mutual arising.

If you want, I can map how interbeing differs subtly from Madhyamaka’s “emptiness” so you can see why Thich Nhat Hanh insisted on a more relational vocabulary rather than purely negating language.