Finding Virtue in Interrelatedness

An Eastern Philosophy for a Virtuous Life (Vol. 4; Issue 50)

Before embarking on my 200th essay, I wish to extend a heartfelt thanks to you, dear readers. You’ve endured agonizing arguments, outrageous opinions, and existential explorations—all ingested during our age of 20-second-video-clip-attention-spans. Thank you ever so much! Please tell everyone you’ve ever met about these Journeys. (Anyone interested in the free subscription need only email me.) Wishing y’all an adventurous and mysterious 2025.

One branch of ancient Buddhist philosophy, the Zen Kyoto school, offers some unique ideas about living a virtuous life. What better way to end the year than by reflecting on ethics? The approach, friendly to any religious tradition because it is philosophy, not theology, promotes the idea of dependent origination. The rather awkward phrase refers to how everything in the universe is connected to, and dependent upon, other things. Nothing exists independently. Everything is, instead, interrelated. The idea resembles the Western idea of holism which proposes that all things are either wholes or parts of wholes.

Keiji Nishitani (1982, 1990), a Kyoto school scholar, explains that:

All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing.

Your body illustrates his point. A surgeon could amputate an arm or a leg, and you’d remain alive. But block your access to air, and you’ll die within a few minutes. You can survive without water for around three days, and without food for around a week. Herein lies the “origin” of the “dependence.” We depend upon those substances more than our limbs. We, in fact, “originate” from them. Therefore, the way we identify ourselves as existing with sacks of skin is patently absurd. Why do we not consider air, water, and food as part of “us”?

Because we form images of “self” or “ego” early in our lives. These identities are later consolidated by culture. We see our “selves” as moving through the world—learning, working, loving, and playing. But, like the Buddha said, the self is a delusion. How our dependence upon external nourishment overshadows parts of our own bodies validates our “normal” delusional nature. We live a lie. We wrongly think our skins define the boundaries of our egos.*

One part of the eightfold path of Buddhism, right understanding, refers to seeing through this illusion of ego. It means developing the capacity to perceive the dynamic interrelatedness of all things. A thought experiment should help: Imagine yourself as an oscillating wave existing within an infinite ocean. Your self is the wave; the universe is the ocean. Your wave is nested in an endless, always changing context, affecting other waves and being affected by them.

Now we arrive at how dependent origination provides a system of ethics. Your personal actions affect others; they affect things. These other persons, as well as these things, affect you. It matters naught that the self is illusory. You still experience “your self” and you exert your will in the world. Your actions affect beings and things.