#huayen

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

It must be admitted that the traditional anthropocentric universe has begun to fade under the careful scrutiny of people who are not sentimentalists or who do not childishly seek security in baseless assumptions. A physicist, or a philosopher such as Whitehead, would have to admit that comfortable old concepts such as the distinction of subject and object, or that of agent and act, metaphysical entities such as souls and selves, or even more fundamental notions such as the absoluteness of time and space, are untenable in the light of objective and serious inquiry. The Western world is alive with new ideas, but so far these ideas have not trickled down to the mass consciousness. Most people still have a deep faith in solid substances and believe that their feelings, ideas, and even their own bodies belong to, or inhere in, some mysterious but seemingly irrefutable substance called a self.

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 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.