At the Center of All Things is Interdependence

The first time I consciously remember my mother teaching me about interdependence, one of the central concepts of Buddhism, I was ten years old. She took out the enormous medical book she used to diagnose the ailments of everyone in our extended family. We oohed and aahed over the diagrams of how a zygote grows into an embryo to become a fetus that eventually transforms into a child all within a woman’s body. And then she turned to me and said: Bhoomo (daughter), can you tell me where the consciousness is in this timeline? Where is the self? When is the self? What is the self when the umbilical cord is still connected? And, what about the mother? Where does her self-hood begin if her own existence would not be possible without her mother and father? She listened to me carefully throughout that evening as we debated these questions and gently nudged me towards the understanding that the only way anything exists is through the complex interplay between other existing things and the magic of circumstance. The true nature of existence is interdependence.

I come from Sikkim, a tiny Buddhist-kingdom-turned-Indian state in the heart of the eastern Himalayas. I belong to a Bhutia family that tends to produce Tibetan Buddhist female practitioners including my mother Tsunma Dechen Zangmo, a Buddhist nun and teacher who passed away in 1997. I am a trained field conservationist and environmental scientist and have worked for one of the largest conservation groups in the world, an Ivy League university, and am now based at a Big Ten university. My sacred land of origin is protected by Mount Kanchenjunga, the third tallest peak in the world, which is known to very few people outside of the Himalayas. There is a reason why. Kanchenjunga is alive for the Bhutia and the Lepcha people of Sikkim; he is sentient; he is powerful; he is our protective deity, and we do not allow him to be climbed or his desecration to be monetized. The Bhutia and the Lepcha people have a cosmology where every part of the natural environment has sentient force. We are raised with the awareness that we exist not only in interdependence with one another but with all of nature. And, this continues to be part of my core set of beliefs and values. 

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