#kegon

The Buddhist Painting of Songgwansa Temple, Suncheon, South Korea (Illustration of Avatamsaka Sutra)

“Then Universally Good also said to the assembly, ‘In the land masses of this ocean of worlds are seas of fragrant waters, as numerous as atoms in unspeakably many buddha-fields. All beautiful jewels adorn the floors of those seas; gems of exquisite fragrances adorn their shores. They are meshed with luminous diamonds. Their fragrant waters shine with the colors of all jewels. Flowers of all kinds of gems swirl on their surfaces. Sandalwood powder settles on the bottom of the seas. They emanate the sounds of Buddhas’ speech. They radiate jewellike light. Boundless enlightening beings, holding various canopies, manifest mystic powers causing the adornments of all worlds to appear therein. Stairways of ten kinds of precious substances are set out in rows, with balustrades of ten kinds of jewels surrounding them. White lotuses ornamented with jewels, as many as atoms in four continents, are spread over the waters, in full bloom. There are unspeakable hundreds of thousands of billions of trillions of banners of ten precious elements, banners of belled gauze of raiments of all jewels, as many as sand grains in the Ganges river, jewel flower palaces of boundless forms, as many as sand grains in the Ganges river, a hundred thousand billion trillion lotus castles of ten precious substances, forests of jewel trees as many as atoms in four continents, networks of flaming jewels, as many sandalwood perfumes as grains of sand in the Ganges, and jewels of blazing radiance emitting the sounds of Buddhas’ speech…”

--From book five “The Flower Bank World” in the The Flower Ornament Scripture (Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra), translated from Chinese by Thomas Cleary. The various sutras were originally composed in Sanskrit and compiled and translated into Chinese in the 5th century CE. Thomas Cleary’s English translation is based on the Chinese translation done by the Khotanese monk Shikshananda (652-710 CE), who translated it at the request of the Tang Empress. 

I stumbled upon this sutra in the back of a book that included a ‘glossary of buddhist terms’ while at a Zen meditation retreat. Flower cosmology? That sounds like my shit. Since I didn’t have my phone I wrote the name down on a piece of paper and slipped it into my backpack. It really is as incredible as I imagined it to be.

“Alan Fox has described the sutra's worldview as ‘fractal’, ‘holographic’, and ‘psychedelic’”—yes.

Kegon (華厳) ([kegõɴ] o en algunos dialectos [keŋõɴ]), es el nombre de una filosofía budista introducida a Japón desde China en el siglo VIII. Kegon (que significa “guirnalda de flores”), es una traducción del Sutra Avatamsaka que originalmente fue escrito en sánscrito y el cual trata del Buda Vairocana.

Esta escuela budista fue fundada en China a finales del siglo VI con el nombre de Huayan…

The Diamond Sutra and Flower-Adorned Sutra

The Diamond Sutra is the abbreviated form translating Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita-Sutra (”The Diamond Sutra of the Perfection of Transcendent Wisdom”). Its primary theme is the emptiness and ephemeral nature of all phenomena. The diamond, as a precious and coveted jewel, can have a negative sense, symbolizing that which impedes the wisdom that leads to enlightenment. The sutra narrates a dialogue between the Buddha and Subhuti, an old monk, who inquires about the nature of perception. The text is prolix, repetitive, and difficult to understand, but it contains one passage of exceptional clarity. In it Buddha enumerates the virtues of a bodhisattva (generosity, morality, patience, courage, concentration, and wisdom) and affirms that the first of these is the greatest, since the future Buddha will radiate compassion without boundaries or hope of reward, solely to help others along the path.

The Avatamsaka-Sutra (The Flower-Adorned Sutra) describes the world as a conjoining of intimately connected and inter-dependent phenomena, whose interactions are infinite. This universe, which has neither temporal nor spatial limitations, is termed the “net of Indra,” a metaphor that conveys the matrix of existence and forms the speculative basis of the two Mahayana schools: Chinese Huayan and Japanese Kegon.

today on Naruto characters wearing unnecessary crop tops: 

Kegon from taki