Tashi Chodron:

།ལུས་དང་དེ་བཞིན་ལོངས་སྤྱོད་དང༌། །དུས་གསུམ་དགེ་བ་ཐམས་ཅད་ཀྱང༌། །སེམས་ཅན་ཀུན་གྱི་དོན་བསྒྲུབ་ཕྱིར། །ཕོངས་པ་མེད་པར་གཏང་བར་བྱ།

Isabella Rossellini:
“My own body and all that I possess,
My past, present and future virtues—
I dedicate them all, withholding nothing,
To bring about the benefit of beings.”

Isabella Rossellini:
Artist Asha Kama Wangdi’s The Windhorse is a massive sculpture created with the thousands of discarded prayer flags gathered in the mountains of Bhutan.

Asha Kama Wangdi:
Normally people hoist these flags to help them raise their luck, help them to recover from misfortunes. So the prayer, the mantras written on the prayer flags are supposed to help us to bring out our goodness. So the horse symbolizes that energy. So it’s basically the horse symbolize the good energy, positive energy that comes out of us, all of us, that positive energy is to the energy that makes us be good, feel good, and bring out compassion for other people.

Isabella Rossellini:
Welcome to season 4 of AWAKEN, a podcast from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I am Isabella Rossellini, an actress, a filmmaker, and your host for this season of AWAKEN, where we are exploring a fundamental concept in Buddhist thinking and philosophy: attachment.

Himalayan art has long been a pathway to insights and awakening, and in this season, we will look at objects from the Rubin’s collection as a way to better understand attachment and its counterpoint, non-attachment, which translates to openness, or seeing things as they truly are. With stories and wisdom from artists, writers, poets, Buddhist teachers, psychologists, scholars, and others we will explore the meaning of attachment and how it shows up in different parts of our lives.

In this episode: Interdependence. There is no question about our interdependence, we cannot exist without each other. And not just each other—even if you make your own food, build your own home, you still have to thank the plants, the trees, the air, the sun—everything that is interconnected with life itself. Just as we discussed in previous episodes, we are not alone and our actions affect everything around us.

Artist Asha Kama Wangdi’s installation The Windhorse illuminates this very concept. Take a moment to look at this artwork at rubinmuseum.org/awaken.

Asha Kama Wangdi:
When we were growing up, we were told we have to respect the Buddhist scripture. We have to respect our own scripture. It’s a speech of the enlightened being. It’s the story of the enlightened being.

Isabella Rossellini:
This is what the prayer flags represent—the foundational Buddhist principles of wisdom and compassion.

Asha Kama Wangdi:
So we cannot discard, we cannot disrespect or destroy it or throw them in a dirty places. But when I see this prayer flags actually being littered up on the mountain, then I said, oh, now I have to do something with this. It’s very bad. And I started collecting and making it into an artwork.

Annabella Pitkin:
This is such a wonderful idea, a piece created out of discarded prayer flags.

Isabella Rossellini:
Annabella Pitkin, scholar of Tibetan ​Buddhism.

Annabella Pitkin:
It’s very visually rich, and the symbolism of interdependence, the idea that this piece takes into itself things that were touched and handled and perhaps at some point valued or not valued by people, and then reimagines them in a new combination, in a new configuration. That’s such a marvelous example of how things actually work all the time in our lives, that all phenomena and causes and conditions, material things, sunshine, rain, chemistry, DNA, culture, TV shows, things that we think of as precious or things that we think of as rubbish, these things are just circulating all the time around us and within us. And we are constantly using and touching all kinds of things and ideas and practices and other beings. And there isn’t any other world except this world of interdependence.

Isabella Rossellini:
When we recognize our interdependence with everything around us, not only do we free ourselves from the focus on ourselves, we also feel more connected.

Asha Kama Wangdi:
We have this saying—do something good for the other and the goodness will return to you.

Isabella Rossellini:
Artist Asha Kama Wangdi.

Asha Kama Wangdi:
It’s just, for example, literally it’s give and take. When you give, you can receive. When you give, you can take. So in the Buddhist philosophy authorities, there is a saying that you don’t have to chant prayer, you don’t have to merit it, you don’t have to do anything. Just have a clear conscience, do good for others. The goodness will come back to you. 

Annabella Pitkin:
And it evokes a deeper understanding, both of environmental and ecological truths that so many people, I think perhaps all of us, are very much aware of more and more now, that there’s no getting away from the consequences of our actions, pollution or trash, waste, the consequences of excavation or extractive mineral extraction, the consequences also of not caring for each other, the kind of detritus of our own unhappiness or our own cruelty or our own feelings of loss. There’s no getting away from any of those unwanted consequences and outputs. They remain, and some of them remain visually available to us, like things that are dropped and discarded that are material. And so in this piece, I see a kind of re-welcoming of all of the thrown away bits, and a reminder, a kind of deep understanding of how those bits that we throw away are also us.

Asha Kama Wangdi:
There’s so many prayer flags have been littered up on the mountain top. So the only problem is so soiled, it’s so bad, it’s so tangled. So many old and thrown away prayer flags are available to make. The first is to clean up the spot that is make it environmentally conscious or do something, do something for the environment because it’s so harmful that when you see many flags that are printed on plastic and nylon are not really good for the trees and for the environment actually up on that particular mountain top. So if you could clear it properly, it helps to make the area regenerate with the plants or trees. The trees get fallen down so badly because it’s entangled with all nylon ropes and things like that. And then the other second reason is spiritually it’s better to untangle these hoisted flags than to hoist a new one. So basically the blessing or the reason for hoisting a flag is same.

Annabella Pitkin:
There are things that cling to us, that are part of us, because of interdependence, that we don’t want, and things we don’t want, that aversion, that’s just another kind of attachment, actually. It’s the flip side of being drawn to grasp at things we want. The flip side of that is our aversion, our desire to free from things we don’t want. And the reality of interdependence and impermanence is that everything is moving all the time, so we can’t grip just one experience, and keep it exactly that way forever. And at the same time, we also can’t avoid anything. It’s all part of us connected to us inescapably all the time.

This work seems to me to stand at the juxtaposition of those realities in its beauty, in its kind of tenderness to things that had been trashed, and in its ecological awareness of the precious land deities, the deities of the land, the living world that we all have a relationship to, whether we acknowledge it or think about it or not, that are honored with wind horses, the realities of ecosystems that are harmed through human carelessness or wastefulness, and then also the kind of tenderness of reincorporating and re-finding beauty in these formerly overlooked items, to create something new, a new node of interconnection that can communicate again to new audiences across geography and perhaps also across time.

Isabella Rossellini:
Contemplative social scientist, Eve Ekman.

Eve Ekman:
I think what I understand to be a bit more about our interconnection, is the term that Thich Nhat Hanh uses of “interbeing,” and that idea that we are truly, not only with each other, but in the more than human world, we’re so deeply connected with the clouds and the earth and the sky.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
I think of interdependence as more associated with connection, but it may also be associated with purpose. It’s simply the recognition that we are not alone, that our health and well-being is enmeshed with a whole ecosystem, if you will, both a human ecosystem as well as an ecosystem that goes beyond that.

Isabella Rossellini:
Psychologist Dr. Richie Davidson, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Founder & Chief Visionary for Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
One of the best examples for this, and one that I encourage people to explore as a kind of daily micro-practice, is around eating. Every human being has to eat, and we all eat typically a few times a day, and it’s a great opportunity to reflect on interdependence.

Reem Assil:
Food is symbolic of the interdependence we have of each other and the world. It is a pathway for connection in that way, so there is a service part of it, but then there’s this symbiotic relationship, and I think similar to organizing.

Isabella Rossellini:
Reem Assil is an activist, chef, community organizer, author, and restaurateur. She aligns her cooking with community activism and social justice.

Reem Assil:
I didn’t get into organizing as an altruist, as a savior, but I wanted to be in service because I knew that was part of my own transformation, is to watch and facilitate the transformation of others.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
Simply inviting a person to reflect on all the people that were required to bring food to your plate, just do that for a minute or so—it’s a humbling experience to appreciate. Wow! It really took all those people working together in this way to enable you to have food on your plate. Interdependence I think is the truth of how the world works, and when we can see it, it’s very affirming of our well-being because it really activates these qualities of connection.

Reem Assil:
I think the easiest way to look at interdependence is to look at what happened in March of 2020 when everything collapsed in the food system, really. That’s the vantage point through which I was looking at things. We just saw how much we needed each other and how everybody came to each other’s aid. When the pandemic hit, it was very stark to me just how fragile our systems are, and how it’s like a domino effect, how one thing impacted the other, and how we had to scramble.

And yet humans are interdependent. It’s just how we naturally are, so those who were in the process of decolonizing—or this was a wakeup call for them and it did actually radicalize them—really went back to their roots of how to help each other. We can’t have one without the other, so there’s an interdependence on our liberation also, that you can’t have someone’s freedom without their food sovereignty.

So, there’s these interdependence of issues, and I do think food, being in the space that I’m in, particularly, sits at the center of so many different sectors and things, issues, that it’s a really great space to be in that transformation. Because if you can solve for some things, it’s dependent. It’ll affect other things.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
We are interdependent.

Isabella Rossellini:
Teacher and meditation master in the Bon Buddhist tradition Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche:
Our identities are interdependent. Our attachments are interdependent. What we’re trying to do here is, our well-being. So I’m attached to our wellbeing. It’s not about me, it’s about the society. It’s about the group. It’s about community. It’s about the family. It’s not about me. I’m only here to serve, to make the best for this group.

So, detaching yourself, you’re trying to grow a little bit more attachment to the group. As a result, you are trying to detach yourself. So there’s actually, it’s very interesting, that you are doing two things together. You are detaching to yourself—that’s detachment—but you are attaching yourself to the group purpose and mission. You have to have both in order to succeed.

Dr. Richie Davidson:
Interdependence is a quality which I think inherently decreases self-importance. We recognize what might previously have been assigned to “ourselves” really is much more accurately reflected in the collective activity of a large group.

Usually, when we’re in this “me, my, I” mode, the default mode you can think of it as having strong connectivity to many other areas of the brain, sort of attaching the first-person pronoun to all the activities that we’re engaging in.

When we have this real deep experience of interdependence, those connections are broken. It’s reflected in measurable changes. We can measure that stuff in a very hard-nosed way using modern neuroimaging methods, and we see an altered pattern of connectivity.

Reem Assil:
And how much bigger of a community, how much more dynamic of a community you can build so we’re forging a new path forward, and I’m here for it.

Ross Gay:
Lately I’ve been thinking something like it’s the pleasant evidence of connection.

Isabella Rossellini:
Poet and essayist Ross Gay’s New York Times Bestseller, The Book of Delights, is a reflection on the joys of noticing ordinary wonders.

Ross Gay:
So you hear birdsong, it’s beautiful to you, you may catch yourself hearing it.

That’s the pleasant evidence of connection. Everything is the evidence of connection, but that’s the pleasant evidence of connection and that connection. Another word for that might be of life, except to be delighting—and that feels like an important verb—to be delighting might mean to participate in that acknowledgment of the pleasant.

So, the thing itself is the delight, but to acknowledge delighting feels like you’re participating as life. You’re recognizing yourself as life. You’re having a pleasant acknowledgment of yourself as life. Of life, of being the thicket, the connection, the fundamental inseparability of all things.

The minute you realize, “Oh, I’m actually not without the sun,” which is to say that I am the sun. “I’m actually not without the rain,” which is to say that I am the rain. “I’m actually not without the zillion critters in my gut and on my skin that are keeping me alive.”

To resist that belongingness is a kind of a sorrow.

Eve Ekman:
This recognition of interbeing in some ways is what happened the night of the Buddha’s awakening.

Isabella Rossellini:
Again, Eve Ekman.

Eve Ekman:
So there he is meditating and has been through so many trials and tribulations. It’s been seven years since he left his home. And he looks at this single leaf. And when he looks at the leaf, he experiences this understanding that every single thing is contained in that leaf. There is cloud, there is earth, there is water, there is sun. And that it is, not only a leaf, it’s part of the tree and it will soon become part of the earth and re-compost.

Ross Gay:
Maybe part of my question, or curiosity, or fun, even, is to periodically or often recognize how lovely it is to belong. And to belong to what is larger, just incomprehensibly larger than any notion of oneself. It can also feel like, “Oh right, the black walnut tree is my beloved, actually.”

Eve Ekman:
And that understanding also has such a favor of our interbeing, the kind of inextricability of our connection to others. It’s very humbling. Humility is a really desired quality in Buddhist contexts. Not so much in our contemporary culture. But humility is right at the foot of gratitude. Sometimes we practice gratitude in a little bit of a transactional way.

Like, “Oh, I’m grateful for this meal, I’m glad I get to eat it.” But the real experience of gratitude is recognizing with reverence and humility that we are being offered something. And all of us, we literally are made up of generosity and of compassion. Our very body is a body that is constituted of others’ generosity, others’ compassion towards us. And that creates this humility and also the opportunity for reciprocity, wanting to give back.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the plant biologist and writer, she talks about when we engage with the natural world and really receive what they are offering—meaning we receive from the blueberry bushes, we receive from the sunlight and we recognize what a gift—it incites and excites us to then protect. Because we protect and guard what we care for.

We can think about that with every being. This idea that we can feel a sense of connection to every being. Feel that sense of gratitude for every being and thereby want to protect them.

Ross Gay:
To note oneself in delight is to note oneself in the midst of connection: I belong to this thing. I think that’s sort of like what the experience or the recognition or the whatevering of being delighted does. You’re put outside of…you’re very clearly being made something by something else. Your body, if we talk about being tickled or being sort of filled up with birds or something, or however the feeling is, or just something lighter and less dramatic than that, but that is happening on account of something that is not you. So it’s a kind of decentering of oneself, the pleasant decentering of oneself, which I think is one of the, it might occasion a kind of gratitude. To be of light and without light at the same time it’s a fake etymology, but to me it just sort of speaks to this true thing, which is that joy is fundamentally very much kind of like delight is the practice of being entangled, the practice of our entanglement. We don’t get out of being entangled. We don’t. We can pretend in a million ways that we’re not, but the fact of the matter is that we are, and it feels to me that joy is what emerges when we do in fact practice that entanglement, which most often or maybe not most often, but maybe it has to do with caring for one another, belonging to one another. The way that I put it in one of these books was that when we help each other carry our sorrows from that sometimes emanates joy.

Isabella Rossellini:
You just heard the voices of Reem Assil, Dr. Richie Davidson, Eve Ekman, Ross Gay, Annabella Pitkin, Asha Kama Wangdi, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. 

I am Isabella Rossellini, your host.

To see the artwork discussed in this episode, go to rubinmuseum.org/awaken.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more stories and news from the Rubin, follow us on Instagram @rubinmuseum and sign up for our newsletter at rubinmuseum.org.

AWAKEN Season 4 is an eight-part series from the Rubin.

AWAKEN is produced by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art with Tenzin Gelek, Jamie Lawyer, Kimon Keramidas, Gracie Marotta, Christina Watson, and Sarah Zabrodski in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC including Tania Ketenjian, Philip Wood, Alessandro Santoro, and Jeremiah Moore.

Original music has been produced by Hannis Brown with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

AWAKEN Season 4 and Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now are supported by Bob and Lois Baylis, Barbara Bowman, Daphne Hoch Cunningham and John Cunningham, Noah P. Dorsky, Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), Mimi Gardner Gates, Fred Eychaner, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Jack Lampl, Dan Gimbel of NEPC, LLC, Agnes Gund, New York Life, Matt and Ann Nimetz, Namita and Arun Saraf, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Eileen Caulfeld Schwab, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, and UOVO.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The Rubin Museum’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

Thank you for listening.