This piece (The Guardian, 5 Jan. 2018) concentrates on the beneficial effects of cleaning your house. But the following paragraph caught our eye:
The characters for “human being” in Japanese mean “person” and “between”. Human being is “a person in between”. Thus, you as a human being only exist through your relations with others – people such as friends, colleagues and family. You as a person have some particular words, facial expressions and behaviours, but these arise only through your interaction and connections with other people. This is the Buddhist concept “en” or interdependence.
This is a basic premise of our project, an insight that can be traced back through the sociology of Erving Goffman to the philosophy of Hegel and beyond, and one that we shall be pursuing in our ancient sources. Good to see that it finds expression in Buddhism too.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/buddhist-monk-cleaning-good-for-you
Featured image: Alamy via The Guardian