Jian / The Between Jiān · Jian / The Between

What you just touched is the between. It is not on the left hand, and not on the right hand; it is in that empty gap in the middle. It is nothing—you cannot point at a thing and say this is it; and yet it clearly is—you just felt that taut force, unmistakably. This is the strangeness of the between: it is empty of everything, yet it really has force, has effect, has that living tension.

So this section is called Symbiosis. The two ends never exist each in isolation and then happen to come together. The two ends live and hold together inside their between—this end exists because that end sets it off; that end exists because this end holds it up; and the setting-off and the holding-up both happen in the between in their middle. They share one between, and in that between, they give birth to each other. This is symbiosis: it is not that there are first two things and then their relation—it is that the two ends and their between are born together, at the same time.