Eastern Philosophy and the Becoming of Possibility: 10 Synthesis: Eastern Relational Ontologies and the Becoming of Possibility

The genealogy of Eastern philosophy reveals a persistent foregrounding of relationality, process, and contingency in the structuring of possibility. From the Vedic articulation of cosmic order, through Buddhist dependent origination, to the interpenetrating networks of Tibetan thought and the systemic principles of Neo-Confucianism, each tradition construes potential as emergent, contextually conditioned, and ethically or cosmically situated.

Across these systems, several recurrent motifs appear:

• Relationality over substance: Entities, selves, and phenomena are defined by interconnections rather than intrinsic essence.

• Processual becoming: Possibility is realised through temporal, contingent, and co-constitutive dynamics.

• Ethical-cosmic alignment: Human, social, and cosmic potentials are inseparable, actualised in accordance with relational, ethical, or natural orders.

• Reflexive construal: Understanding and action co-evolve with the conditions that make them intelligible, creating feedback loops between perception, cognition, and the field of potential.

The Eastern lineage thus offers a complementary genealogy to Western relational thought, emphasising emergent, contingent, and contextually embedded construals of possibility. Where Western philosophy often abstracts potential into formal structures or universals, Eastern traditions situate potential within dynamic, interdependent, and ethically or cosmically attuned frameworks.

By tracing these patterns, we see that possibility is never neutral or isolated. It is co-constituted through symbolic, ethical, cognitive, and relational matrices, revealing how human understanding, imaginative capacity, and ethical agency are historically and cosmologically conditioned. In short, the Eastern philosophical lineage demonstrates that the becoming of possibility is inseparable from the relational fields through which it is actualised.

Modulatory voice: Collective synthesis of the series; meta-perspective on relational and processual construal.