Nothing stand alone by itself

Nothing can stand on its own. Everything is interwoven, connected, tied up with everything else in this dense tangle of relationships. It took me a long time of watching and living before I came to see that. And it matters a lot that I did, because I grew up in a world that celebrates individualism and pushes separateness, hearing all those stories about self-made startups and self-made billionaires, and I picked up that Western way of thinking fairly early myself.

But I’ve come to see that nothing exists independently, on its own. There have to be conditions, some cause, before a thing or an event can be here as it is. That’s what follows from the law of cause and effect, and from the interbeing of all things.

Take the matter of eating, day to day. The bowl of rice I eat is the result of an enormous amount of labor. Someone has to cook it. And for it to be cooked, someone has to bring it here. And for it to be brought here, the rice has to be grown. And for it to be grown, there has to be a farmer’s care — the people our elders described as selling their face to the earth and their back to the sky (farming is lighter now than it used to be, with tools and modern machinery, but the effort they put in is still not small). And for that care to happen, the farmer has to rely on seed and soil and water. Without all of that, how would I have a bowl of hot rice in my hands?

And then to cook it you need pots and pans. And someone has to make the pots and pans. And to make them you need technology, machinery. And for there to be machinery, any number of people had to put years into research and manufacturing. And technology without natural resources is no use anyway. So where do the resources come from? From the shifting of the universe, from an earth that took millions of years to form and develop. And then where did the earth come from? Just asking basic questions like that, without even going deep or trying to cover everything, is enough to see that what we have now is the crystallization of countless things.

And beyond that, a tray of food is a whole way of living, a thread of culture, a regional signature. If you set the consumer economy and globalization aside, each tray of food is probably its own cultural and culinary ecosystem, with local ingredients, its own way of cooking, the taste of the people native to that place. And even the names of the ingredients, the utensils, the cooking itself can differ a great deal. I still remember going down to Sóc Trăng — we’d just finished eating, and I went out with some friends to wash up, and a neighbor saw us and asked, “Mồi bén không con?” I was lost, I had no idea what she meant. Only afterward did I find out she was asking whether the food had been good. On that same trip I fell for the bún nước lèo down there and the plate of raw herbs that came with it, things I’d never tasted up in this sun-and-wind-and-flood country in the Central region. And that plate of herbs had every kind of green on it, names I didn’t know, every shape and smell in there. The day I stayed with the nun, I was surprised to learn she’d picked all of it from the roadside and the paddies, no need to go buying anything at the market. This river country of the Cửu Long is fiercely abundant. And then another time in Đồng Tháp, I heard the men there say that cá linh is the local specialty, that only that stretch has it — further downstream the fish is still there, but it isn’t as good as around Đồng Tháp.

That’s what it means to say nothing stands on its own. A thing shows up as itself, expresses itself as itself, because of the causes and conditions, the context that made it that way. And things, events, people, phenomena all carry inheritance in them. My regional accent, for instance, came from my grandparents and parents, where else. This independence and peace came from generation after generation of forebears giving their blood to hold onto it, where else. The Vietnamese we speak now inherits from and carries on and transforms and intermingles with Mường, with Chinese, and with French too. And the letters we write came out of the inventive work of Western missionaries. And those missionaries didn’t make the Vietnamese alphabet entirely on their own either; they made it out of their own mother tongues, combined with observation and with adjusting it to fit the local people, not by sheer will. And they only laid the foundation; it was Trương Vĩnh Ký later on, and any number of others, who did the painstaking work of spreading it. And it came to a head during the bình dân học vụ years, the mass literacy campaign the state launched, after which Vietnamese came into wide use among the whole population, up to now.

That mixing, intermingling, transforming, learning, inheriting is a natural law of human society. And this human species, along with the animals and the viruses and bacteria on this earth, all share a common origin in LUCA, the common ancestor of all life in this world that we’re able to trace back to. The biological and physical worlds work the same way. And if you dig further you start to see how boundless this is, the layer upon layer of dependent arising, the interbeing of this world. Talk about food and it goes through culture. Talk about culture and it knocks into history. And then history runs into biology. And biology runs into astronomy and the cosmos. And from the cosmos it can run right into existential and philosophical questions. Which of them is separate from the others?

Seeing that, I suddenly felt a lot easier. For a while I kept disowning my own work and effort, treating it as not worth counting, not important. Because a lot of what I do comes from someone else’s idea rather than something I thought up. So whatever anyone said, I’d say, “I didn’t do that, that was A’s idea, I just carried it out.” But hold on — whatever A or B thought up was itself learned and synthesized and inherited and developed from other people. And A or B and I aren’t separate from each other, that I should draw the line like that. We eat together, live together, work together, go out together, serve together, we’re after the same thing together. Besides, everyone has their own task, nobody can do everything in the world. Everyone has a strength, and working to your own strength is the natural thing. And the biological world has always been a chain of close relationships, interacting with each other, balancing each other out. Every creature of every kind has its own role in this physical life. So A thinks it up and I do it if I find it fits. That’s all. We’re all going toward the same thing anyway, and I can absolutely shape it, fix it, adjust it as I see fit. If I don’t have a better idea, then fine. And if not, I can choose not to do it.

What used to bother me came from thinking too much of myself. From inflating my own ego. Nothing would do unless it was entirely by me, from me, and mine. That’s too greedy, too foolish. The reality, the law that’s always held, is cooperation, sharing, inheritance, adaptation. Nothing is original. Nothing exists on its own. So why do I have to keep clinging to the word “mine” and make it hard on myself?

Nobody wants to be in a place with one enormous tree in it, and no landscape that strange exists anyway. And if it did it wouldn’t last, because it’s far too unnatural. To get big it had to be nourished when it was small, and from small to big, how would it develop with no big trees tending it and sheltering it, no nutrients from rich organic soil? And that organic richness only happens where change, where arising and passing, keeps going. Otherwise the whole thing dies out.

But a forest full of canopies, every kind of plant and grass and animal, every kind of sound and color — that’s what’s really interesting. And that forest is lush, and strong, and solid. If something disturbs it, it comes back fast. Diverse, in all colors and all forms — that’s how it should be.

So whatever comes, comes, and whatever I can do, I do. I need to go along with the current of all things in order to do what needs doing, and what I want to do. Lightly, unhurriedly. Whatever effect I have, whatever I do, it’s enough to plant the cause and not try to fix the fruit. Whatever I want, I have to look at where things actually are in order to take the next step properly, rather than just willing it into being. And what’s the point of willing things into being when I can’t control anything except my own perspective, my own thinking, my own actions? Come to think of it, I often can’t master my feelings either — they’re just things that arise and then pass away, like any other natural phenomenon, like any other current outside me. All I have to do is choose what to do with them.

Do what you can do. Let what comes, come. Prepare the ground and the posture beforehand. Try to understand how cause and effect run. Watch how the world shifts. Then choose your own way of entering it. Not resisting, not controlling. Borrowing the force rather than being the obstruction. Going with the current, not against it.

A few reflections on life and the world, and on myself.