Inter-be

The penultimate chapter of Thich Nhat Hanh’s You Are Here explores the Buddha’s essential teachings. It is a chapter, he explains, to help rid meditative practitioners of false teachings oftentimes ascribed to the Buddha. “If you are not sure that a teaching you have received is authentic,” he writes, “you should refer to these marks.” He is referring to the three ‘Dharma Seals’: impermanence, non-self, and nirvana.

A Westerner might consider the language that Hanh uses and find it impactful. He says that “nothing has a permanent identity” and that impermanence itself is nothing negative. Pre-Socratic philosophers in our Western tradition also explored a similar revelation about the constant change in everything – Heraclitus espoused that you cannot step in the same river twice, albeit once

Hanh writes, “We are made of elements called form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.” Encouraging us to “look deeply into their nature,” we come to understand things for what they really are: manifestations. “A feeling or a perception is very real,” writes Hanh, “but you cannot find anything permanent in it. You cannot detect a permanent presence in anything whatsoever. You will never find anywhere a self, or a soul, that lasts.” Many who are familiar with popular Buddhism might object, broaching the ‘notion’ of a soul that survives death and lives on. Nevertheless, Hanh warns that, “…this is not really what the Buddha taught.” 

Enter the example of the corn seed. Westerners, might think that when a seed of corn dies, it is the end of that seed. Of course for the Christian as well as the Buddhist, seeds of corn do not bear souls. Yet Hahn’s example encourages us to see the seed as in a process of transformation: the seed technically dies yet gives life to a whole other corn plant. The seed is impermanent, but manifestation of another corn plant is feasible given the proper conditions. For life to continue, a death -- or, ceased manifestation -- is invariably necessary. 

Hahn elaborates further: “There is only continuation, only manifestation, because birth and death are just ideas. Being and nonbeing are just concepts. Reality is free from all these ideas and concepts.” Hahn admits that life is possible after death, but there is no need of a permanent entity to make life itself at all possible. What makes life possible is that we inter-are inasmuch as life itself inter-is. 

Whether people or corn, we cannot have separate existences because it is impossible. A corn plant does not need a self or, “separate existence” to produce flowers and fruit; it need only “inter-be” with the whole cosmos. “Reject impermanence,” Hanh writes, “and you reject life.”