Co-Becoming

Song Bing's translation of gongsheng / kyōsei, 共生: a worldview in which entities are "mutually embedded, coexistent, and co-generating," so that no individual is self-contained. She sources it in four propositions — the unity of tian and humans, the oneness of all beings (Zhang Zai's "all things are my companions," grounded in qi), shengsheng or ceaseless generating from the Book of Changes, and Buddhist co-dependent origination — and argues that holobiont biology and symbiogenesis now corroborate it as "a mundane, prosaic fact." "Becoming" rather than "being" registers ceaseless change as the first cosmic rule. Its ethics reject zero-sum thinking and the maximization ethos in favor of restraint and companionship with nonhumans; Gilman, Nakagawa and Ryan, and Marsili all reuse the term.