Huayan Buddhism and Indra’s Net: Mutual Containment in the Flower Ornament School

The Flower Ornament school’s teaching that every thing contains every other thing, and how its contemplations work

What is Indra’s net in Huayan Buddhism?

Indra’s net is the image the Chinese Huayan school (Japanese Kegon, Korean Hwaeom) uses for how phenomena relate: a vast net strung with jewels, where each jewel reflects every other jewel, so each one contains the reflections of all the rest. The school’s teaching of interpenetration comes from the Avataṃsaka (Flower Ornament) Sūtra and is developed through the patriarchs Dushun, Zhiyan, Fazang, Chengguan and Zongmi: any single thing is what it is only through the whole web of others, and the whole web is present in it. The net image is the school’s way of picturing that teaching. Those are the school’s own claims, stated in its texts; they are philosophy and contemplation rather than tested psychology.

Huayan (Chinese; Kegon in Japanese, Hwaeom in Korean) is the Buddhist school built on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, the Flower Ornament Scripture, a very long Mahāyāna text whose vision is of a cosmos in which buddhas, bodhisattvas and ordinary beings interpenetrate without obstruction. The school’s traditional line runs from Dushun through Zhiyan (602–668), who taught Fazang, to Fazang (643–712), the third patriarch and its systematizer. Fazang’s letters with the Korean monk Ŭisang, who was also a disciple of Zhiyan, and his teaching of the Korean monk Shimsang, who helped carry the school to Japan, are part of how it spread across East Asia. The image most associated with it is Indra’s net, which the school uses to picture mutual containment. Francis Cook’s study of the school, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, is the standard English introduction. The practices below follow the school’s own texts and its commentators, and say plainly where the evidence is historical or philosophical rather than experimental.