The hyper-individualism and ecocidal anthropocentrism that have characterized dominant strains of modernity are rapidly becoming failed epistemologies according to a broad swath of contemporary academic disciplines. New Materialists, multispecies ethnographers, and others inspired by “the ontological turn” in anthropology have coined new vocabularies to articulate their insights into interdependence, featuring words like symbiosis, assemblage, kinship, relatedness, entanglement, co-presence, and more. For all the critical and creative dynamism of these varied inquiries into interdependence, few Euro-American critical theorists seem to realize the overlap of their ideas with elements of Buddhist philosophy, most notably dependent origination (Skt. pratītyasamutpāda; Tib. tendrelརྟེན་འབྲེལ།). This paper proposes that we rectify that omission by inviting the full range of meanings of tendrel into the English language in hopes that we can reconsider human freedom as interdependent, generated through the tendrel of auspicious connections between the human and more-than-human facets of our world.