#huayan

I loved doing this hair for Huayan

From “The Flower Bank World” in the Avatamsaka Sutra

The Buddhist allegory of "Indra's Net" tells of an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time. At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of "Absolute Being" illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net-but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

This matter of relationship is extremely important, and perhaps the most important difference between the Hua-yen view of things and the ordinary view is that people ordinarily think and experience in terms of distinct, separate entities, while Hua-yen conceives of experience primarily in terms of the relationships between these same entities. It is simply a question of fundamental, basic reality; is it separate parcels of matter (or mental objects) or is it relationship? It is interesting in this regard to see that a great number of Western physicists have now drawn the conclusion, based on the implication of Einstein’s theories, that relationship is the more fundamental. As one physicist remarked, if all the matter in the universe less one bundle of matter ceased to exist, the mass of the remaining parcel of matter (and hence its existence) would be reduced to nothing, the implication being that mass is a function of total environment and dependent on it. Nonetheless, in the seventh century, Fa-tsang and other Hua-yen masters taught that to exist in any sense at all means to exist in dependence on the other, which is infinite in number. Nothing exists truly in and of itself, but requires everything to be what it is.

“…the “Entry into the Realm of Reality” (Gandhavyuha Sutra in Sanskrit), relates the journey of the pilgrim Sudhana to a sequence of fifty-three different bodhisattva teachers. These great bodhisattvas present a democratic vision of dharma, as they include women and men, laypeople and priests, beggars and kings and queens. The chapter culminates with Sudhana’s entry into the inconceivably vast tower of Maitreya Bodhisattva, the next future buddha—a lofty, mind-boggling episode that even the special-effects wizardry of George Lucas and his colleagues could not begin to capture. Maitreya’s tower, as extensive as all of space, contains a vast number of equally spacious towers overflowing with amazing sights, each without interfering with the space of any of the others.”  -Taigen Dan Leighton on the ‘Flower Ornament Sutra’ 

The totalistic world described by Hua-yen is a living body in which each cell dervies its life from all other cells, and in return gives life to those many others. Like the human body, the Hua-yen universe is ever changing, for in it there is not one thing which is static and unchanging, unless it is the law of perpetual change itself. It is an incredible stream of activity wherein when one circumstance alters, everything alters with it. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” asks one of T.S. Eliot’s characters, and the question of action becomes an extremely delicate one to the individual who sees the fantastic interaction of things. Thus in a universe which is pure fluidity, or process, no act can but have an effect on the whole, just as a pebble tossed into a pool sends waves out to the farthest shore and stirs the very bottom. This is hard to see. We can comprehend how a modification in one small part of our body can affect the total organism, but we find it hard to believe that the enlightenment of one monk under a tree in India somehow enlightens us all, or, conversely, that my own intransigent ignorance is a universal ignorance. However, if we can comprehend that the greater whole of which the body is a part is no less organic, and no less interrelated, such an idea is not so unlikely. At that point, the moral life as conceived by Buddhism becomes possible.