Titles in the IASWR Series

Buddhist Monastic Discipline: The Sanskrit Prātimoksa Sūtras of the Mahāsāmghikas and Mulasarvāstivādins, by Charles
S. Prebish,

Hua-yen Buddhism
The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti: A Mahāyāna Scripture, translated by Robert A. F. Thurman.

Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jeuel Net of Indra, by Francis H. Cook.

The Jewel Net of Indra

Sutra of the Past Vou's of Earth Store Budhisattva: The Collected Lectures Tripitaka Master Hsüan Hua, translated by
Heng Ching.

Avatāra: The Humanization of Philosophy Through the Bhagavad Gitā, by Antonio T. de Nicolás.

Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma, translated by Leon Hurvitz.

Francis H. Cook
The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park and
London

xiv
Preface

The Jewel Net of Indra

His death in 1970 was a terrible loss for Buddhist Studies, as well as a personal
loss. A generous Fulbright Fellowship for study in Japan from 1966 to 1968
made it possible for me to acquire many hard-to-get materials, to have a ycar
and a half of luxurious time in which to do nothing but study Hua-yen literature,
and to meet and talk with authoritative Japanese experts. Among the latter, I
am especially grateful for the friendly help and support of Professors Makita,
Nagao Gadjin, and Kajiyama Yuichi, of Kyoto University, and my friend and fellow
researcher Aramaki Noritoshi of the Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto
University. The memory of many fruitful and pleasant hours in their
company is one of the few treasures I am greedy enough to hang on to. Finally, my wife
Betty contributed immcasurably to my being able to pursue Buddhist Studies while
in graduate school and in Japan. Though her help took many forms, it would have
been invaluable if for no other reason than that she has always supported me in my
belief that the study of Buddhism is worthwhile. My debts extend beyond these,
also, but where do they end? May the help of all these earn them countless kalpas in the
Tushita Heavens.
An earlier work, C.C. Chang's Buddhist Teaching of Totality, is the first full length
treatment of Hua-ycn thought in a Western language, but I have several reservations
about some of its interpretations. Yet it can be recommended for its sympathetic discussion of
the general outlines of Hua-yen cosmology. The reader could do no better than to read it
before taking up this book.

Francis H. Cook
University of California, Riverside 1975
Western man may be on the brink of an entirely new understanding of the nature of
existence. The work of classification and analysis which was born from the work of
ancient Greck civilization has bornc its fruit in the overwhelming success of
Western man in manipulating the natural world, including himself. This conquest and
manipulation has proceeded without pause, each success engen dering new possibilities and
successes, and there is reason to believe that this manipulation and exploitation will
continue. However, some have begun to wonder if we have not had too much success;
the very virtuosity with which we manipulate the natural world has brought us,
according to some critics, to the thin line separating success from terrible disaster. Only
very recently has the word "ecology” begun to appear in our discussion, reflccting
the arising of a remarkable new consciousness of how all things live in interdependence. The
traditional methods of analysis, classification, and isolation tended to erect boundaries around
things, setting them apart in groups and thereby making casier their manipulation, whether
intellectually or technologically. The ecolog ical approach tends rather to stress the
interrelatedness of these same things. While not naively obliterating distinctions of
property and function, it still views existence as a vast web of interdependencies in which
if one strand is disturbed, the whole web is shaken. The ccological viewpoint has not,
that is, brought into question the ancient distinctions of property and function which lie
behind a brilliant technology. Honey bees and apple blossoms remain what they have always
been in our cyes, but added to this way of knowing is another, newer way—the knowledge that
these entities need each other for survival itself. This understanding comes to lis in the nature of
a revelation; an cternally abiding truth has burst upon our consciousness, with an urgent message
concerning our life. This new knowledge demands, in fact, a complete reassessment of the
manner in which things exist. Perhaps this revelation is not yet closed, and in time we may
come to perceive that this interdependency is not simply biological and

2
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra3
economic, a matter of bees and blossoms, or plankton and oxygen, but a
vastly more pervasive and complicated interdependency than we have so far
imagined.
But this book is not about ecology, at least not directly, and not at all in the sense
in which we now use the word. It presents a view of man, nature, and their
relationship which might be called ecological in the more pervasive and compli
cated sense mentioned above, one which we might, in fact, call "cosmic
ecology." It is a Buddhist system of philosophy which first appeared in a written,
systematic form in China in the seventh century, and it was the characteristic
teaching of what came to be known as the Hua-yen school of Buddhism. It is a view
of existence which is for the most part alien to Western ways of looking at things,
but it is a world view well worth consideration, not only as a beautiful artifact
appealing to the esthetic sense, but perhaps as a viable basis for conduct, no less
plausible than the traditional Western basis.
We may begin with an image which has always been the favorite Hua-yen
method of exemplifying the manner in which things exist. 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 cach "eye” of the net, and since the nct itself
is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels,
glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now
arbitrarily select one of thesc 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. The Hua-yen school has been fond of this image, mentioned many
times in its literature, because it symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an uns infinitely
repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This dus
relationship is said to be one of simultancous mutual identity and mutual inter
causality,
If we take ten coins as symbolizing the totality of cxistence and examine the T
relationship existing among them, then, according to Hua-yen teaching, coin one will be
seen as being identical with the other nine coins. Simultaneously, coin two will be seen as
being identical with the other nine coins, and so on throughout the collection of coins.•
Thus, despite the fact that the coins may be of different denominations, ages, metals,
and so on, they are said to be completely identical. This is said to be the static
relationship of the coins. If we take these same ten coins again and examine their
dynamic relationship, then, according to the Hua-yon masters, they will be scen as
bcing totally interdependent or intercausal
(depending on point of view). Seen in this way, coin one is said to be the cause for the
totality of coins which are considered as being dependent on the first coin for their
being. Coin one, that is, is the support, while the total group is that which is supported.
Since that particular totality could not exist without the support of coin one,
that coin is said to be the sole cause for the totality. However, if we shift our attention
to coin two and now examine its relationship to the other nine coins, the
same can now be said of this coin. It is the sole cause for the existence of the totality of
ten coins. From the standpoint of each of the ten coins, it can be said that
that coin is the sole cause for the whole. However, the cause-result relationship
is even more fluid than this, for while each coin can, from the stand point of the one coin, be
said to act as sole cause for the whole, simultaneously the whole acts as cause for the
one coin in question, for the coin only exists and has any function at all within the total
environment. It can never be a question of the coin existing outside its environment,
because since the ten coins symbolize the totality of being, a coin outside the context
of the ten coins would be a nonentity. Thus each individual is at once the cause
for the whole and is caused by the whole, and what is called existence is a
vast body made up of an infinity of individuals all sustaining each other and defining
each other. The cosmos is, in short, a self-crcating, self-maintaining, and self-
defining organism. Hua-yen calls such a universe the dharma-dhātu, which we
may translate as “cosmos" or "universe" if we wish, with the proviso that it is not the
universe as commonly imagined, but rather the Hua-yen universe of identity and interdependence.
Such a universe is not at all familiar to Western people. The Judeo-Christian religious
tradition and the Greek philosophical tradition have bequeathed to their
posterity a view of existence very much different from that conceived by the
Chinese. It differs in several respects. First, it has been, and to some extent still is, a
universe which must be explained in terms of a divine plan, with respect to
both its beginning and its end. The Hua-yen world is completely nonteleolog ical. There
is no theory of a beginning time, no concept of a creator, no question of
the purpose of it all. The
universe is taken as a given, a vast fact which can be explained only in terms of its own inner
dynamism, which is not at all unlike the vicw of twentieth-century physics. Moreover, our familiar
world is one in which relationships are rather limited and special. We have blood
relationships, marital relationships, relationships with a genus or species, relationships in
terms of animate and inanimate, and the like, but it is hard for us to imagine how anything
is related to everything else. How am I related to a star in Orion? How am I even related to
an Eskimo in Alaska, cxccpt through the tenuous and really nonopera tive relationship of
species? I certainly don't feel related to these other things. In short, we find it much easier to
think in terms of isolated beings, rather than one
This mutual en idenhty . and
mutual inter
causality

4
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra
5
Being. Being is just that, a unity of cxistence in which numerically separate entities are
all interrelated in a profound manner. Beings are thought of as autonomous, isolated
within their own skins, each independent by and large from all the rest of the beings
(both animate and inanimate). The "mystic" who speaks of identity with such
things as animals, plants, and inanimate objects, as well as other men, is an
object of ridicule. The Hua-yen universe is essentially a universe of identity and
total intercausality; what affects one item in the vast inventory of the cosmos affects every
other individual thercin, whether it is death, enlightenment, or sin. Finally, the Western
view of existence is onc of strict hierarchy, traditionally one in which the creator-god
occupies the top rung in the ladder of being, man occupies the middle space, and other
animals, plants, rocks, etc., occupy the bottom. Even with the steady erosion of religious
interest in the West, where the top rung of the ladder has for many become empty,
there still exists the tacit assumption that man is thc mcasure of all things, that this is his
universe, that somehow the incalculable history of the vast universe is essen tially a
human history. The Hua-yen universe, on the other hand, has no hierarchy. There is no
center, or, perhaps if there is onc, it is everywhere. Man certainly is not the center, nor
is some god.
It must be admitted that the traditional anthropocentric universe has begun to fade
under thc careful scrutiny of people who are not sentimentalists or who do not childishly
scek 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 cven 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 thcir own bodies belong to, or inhere in, somc mysterious but seemingly
irrefutable substance called a self.
It has been said that you cannot kill an idea, but it is even more difficult to sec a new
idea get a hcaring in the community of men. Shrinking from a reality which he assumes
will demcan, him, man hangs on to his old habits of thought, which are really prejudices, just as
he clung to his security blanket in his crib. The anthropocentric bias, particularly, has appeared
in one form or another down through Western history. It is of course endemic in the Hebraic and
Christian traditions, and it has also given risc to drcadful philosophy for a period of
hundreds of ycars--in Cartesianism, with its affirmation of human consciousness and its vícw
of dead nature, in the "Great Chain of Being" of the cighteenth-century
philosophers, and even today among the positivists, in whom we detect a post tivism which
shrinks from taking the ultimate step in its positivism. The most ingenious attempts
of Western thinkers to erect a satisfying picture of existence has resulted, in
short, in a not too surprising conclusion that while he is less than a god, he stands just
below the angels, superior to and apart from all other things. One may ask whether
this conclusion has not risen out of a pathetic self-deception.
It is a truism that a culture reveals its fundamental assumptions and presupposi
tions in its art forms, and it is partly for this reason that the study of art is so
rewarding. In European art, at least up to the advent of the Romantic movement, a
representative, and perhaps dominant, genre has been the portrait. To walk
through the rooms of a large art museum is to receive an eloquent
testimonial concerning the preoccupation of Western man for the last several
hundred years. If we examine one of these paintings, we find that it will be
dominated by a face or several faces. The artist has drawn upon every
resource of his genius and materials to render the face realistic, lifelike. It is
invariably grave and composed, befitting a person who had no doubts as to his
worth in the general scheme of things. Are ye not of more worth than many
sparrows? Yes, of course! Every quirk of personality is here, along with the warts,
bumps, hollows, and spidery lines of much frowning and laughing. The clothes,
too, are lovingly painted; we have, in gazing at the portrait, an almost tactile sense
of the stiffness and roughness of lace, the suave, warm plushness of velvet, and
rich, hard luxury of silk. Rings, brooches, and pendants garnish the figure, glinting
weightily with gold and silver. The skillful use of chiaroscuro bestows on the
figure the roundness and solidity of life. But there is something else too, though
we are in danger of overlooking it in our justified concentration on the grand face
and figure domi nating the canvas. Over the shoulder of the subject we detect a tiny
fragment of world, perhaps secn through the tiny window of the lord's palace. If we do
not look sharply, it may not even register on our consciousness, but in its own
way, it is an important part of the picture for it tells us much. It occupies, in some
paintings, only a hundredth part of the whole canvas, or, if it fills in the back ground,
the coloring and style are such that the scene serves only as an unobtrusive
backdrop for the real focal point of the picture. It is there for several reasons; it
helps the painter avoid a dull and unimaginative background for the human foreground: it
often contains symbols which help us "read" the meaning of the painting; or it defines and places
in its correct context (seventeenth-century Florence, the world, etc.) the truc subject.
However, all these uses of the natural world add up to one; it serves as a backdrop for the
human drama, which is not only what painting is about but what the universe is all about. Man
still dwells comfortably in the pre-Copernican universe, where the world is a stage
created
6
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra7
parts, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereof. Man often
resembles Warty Bliggens, the toad, in Don Marquis' poem:
for the most important of dramas, the human one. Even in the nineteenth century, when
painters turned their attention to natural scenes as intrinsically valuable, the
romantics tended to invest their scenery with human emotions and values and to
see the natural only in a human frame of reference. They betray, however subtly, what
critics have called the “pathetic fallacy,” the tendency to read human values into nature
and to sentimentalize it. Whencver Western painters have taken up the brush or chisel,
they have revealed this abiding belief in a hicrarchical existence in which the human
ranks only slightly below the divine.
To see that this is not a universal penchant and to simultaneously see a portrait of the
universe as experienced by another part of the human family, we might briefly turn
to the Oriental wing of our art museum. In the art of the Far East we see few faces—
an empress or two, a few high-ranking Buddhist monks at most. We see mainly
landscapes, done in black ink on silk or paper, for just as portraiture and human events
are the dominant Western concern, the landscape is dominant in Oriental art. Yet
humans are there in the landscapes, along with their homes, occupations, and
diversions. But if one were to walk quickly past the scrolls, these figures would be
almost, or completely, overlooked, for they do not stand out in the paintings. In fact,
no one part of the scene dominates the others. The scene is one of mountains,
trees, a stream or lake, perhaps a small hut barely visible in the trecs, and a small
human figure or two. The mountains recede into the hazy distance, suggesting
great spaces, and while the scene is tranquil and serene, there is nevertheless the
strong suggestion of a living vitality, a breathing life. The viewer is struck by a
scrise of continuity among the various elements of the scene, in which all are united
in an organic whole. The humans in the picture, which are almost always there, have their
rightful place in this scene, but only their rightful place as one part of the wholc. Nature
here is not a background for man; man and nature are blended together
harmoniously. Even this way of analyzing the scene distorts the situation; we see
only being itself in its totality, "man" being merely one isolatable element of no more
or less prominence than a trec or a bird. Are ye not of more worth than many
sparrows? No.
These two examples of art revcal, I suggest, two different ways of under standing not
only man's place in the total schcmc of things, but the basic structure of existence in general.
The humanistic or anthropocentric orientation of the first painting is clearly in sharp
contrast with the landscape, assuming the status of a self-evident presupposition.
The humanistic bias of the former also reflects a tacit assumption that being is
organized in a hierarchical manner, in which some parts of cxistcnce-notably the
divine and human---stand above other
i met a toad the other day by the name of warty bliggens he was sitting under a
toadstool feeling contented he explained that when the cosmos was created that
toadstool was especially planned for his personal shelter from sun and rain thought
out and prepared for him do not tell me said warty bliggens that there is not a
purpose in the universe the thought is blasphemy a little more conversation
revealed that warty bliggens considers himself to be the center of the said a
universe the earth exists to grow toadstools for him to sit under the sun to give him
light by day and the moon and whceling constellations to make beautiful the night for the
sake of warty bliggens!

Historically there has been little doubt on the part of Western man that he does

8
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra
9
stand apart from, and superior to, all else. When he gazes out at the creation,
he sees a reality which is primarily broken and fragmented, with none of the conti
nuity and interrelatedness which we observed in the Chinese landscape, and
of course this discontinuity, or alienation, exists mainly for him and his confronta tion with
the other. This would be of merely academic interest were it not for the fact that
such a view is said to cause the individual to suffer greatly.
Now, while there seems to be a fundamental difference in the way Western and
Eastern people regard experience, let it not be assumed that a Chinese or Japanese
is born into the world with a vision of identity and interdependence. Buddhism
was founded by an Indian and the Hua-yen school was a product of Chinese experience;
both were taught to help Oriental people, who suffer from the same existential plight
that Western people do. Human beings are basically the same in the manner in which
they organize experience through recurrent training, learning to make sense out
of what William James spoke of as a “bloom ing, buzzing confusion.” However,
Buddhism did arise in the East, indicating that there is a tendency to sell things as
described by Hua-yen. Conversely, the tendency in the West has been to analyze
rather than unify, to discriminate rather than see all as one, to make distinctions
rather than see all qualities within each datum of experience. But the truth of the
matter is that the universe as described in Hua-yen documents is the world as seen by
cnlightened individuals, Buddhas, and not by ordinary folk of any race, timc, or geographic
area. Thus the Hua-yen vision is not at all self-evident, even to a Chinese
philosopher. The message of Buddhism is claimed to be universal; since all men
suffer in the same basic way, the cure is universally beneficial.
The Chinese landscapes described above can be thought of as plastic duplicates of
Hua-yen philosophy, in the sense that both attempt to express a vision of the manner in which
things exist. What is clear from both is that there is a great emphasis on the relatedness of
things, and as was mentioned, this relationship is the dual one of identity and
interdependence. 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 implications
of Einstein's theories, that relationship is the more fundamental. As one physicist has
remarked, if all the matter in the universc less onc bundle of macier ccascd to exist, the mass
of the remaining parcel of matter and hence its
cxistence) 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-yon masters taught that to exist in any sense at all means to cxist in
dependence on the other, which is infinite in nuniber. Nothing exists truly in and of
itself, but requires everything to be what it is.
Previously, in cxamining the relationship existing among ten coins, it was said that any onc
coin is identical with all the other coins. The reader has undoubt edly heard of this business
of identity before, Oh yes, the Mysterious East has this obsession with Identity. We
smile to think of the yogi walking through the jungle meditating on the sameness of
things and being pounced upon and eaten by a real, unmystical tiger. So much for
identity, we say, in the belief that we have disposed of any nonsense about
identity. Or, like the cynic in Orwell's Animal Farın, we may grant that
things are all equal, but some things are more equal than others. Things
seem to be very unequal, radically nonidentical. But the Hua-yen masters were
not mystics, and while agreeing that there were men and tigers, eaters and eaten,
they could insist on identity anyway. Let us turn to another example of identity in an
attempt to see in what way things are just what they are and yet identical.
We might take the example of a human body as a kind of organic whole similar
to the totality analyzed by Hua-yen. Here too we can agree that there are distinctions in
form and function among the constituents of the whole body. My ears do not look like
my toes, and I cannot see with my elbow. Ears detect sounds, my stomach digests food,
my nose detects odors and helps me to breathe. We do not confuse the parts; we
know where everything is and what it does. It is equally evident that what we call
the body is an organism made up of all these parts, and normally the parts do not
exist apart from the body. (The body analogy breaks down in this matter because a
toe can be severed from the body and continue to exist. However, taking the cosmos
as a totality, this would not happen, since the disappearance of something from
the totality would be tanta mount to its having become a nonentity.) If we now look into
the relationship between any one part of the body and the whole body, it will be obvious
that we are really discussing the relationship between this one part and all other parts,
whether considered individually or collectively,
Let us examine the place of the nose, being prominent and therefore seeming to offer itself
for inspection. In what sense is it identical with my body or with any other part of the body? The
Hua-yen argument is really very simple; what we call the whole is nothing apart from the
individuals which make up that whole. Thus the nose, in being integrated perfectly into the
configuration we call a body, not only acts as a condition without which there could be no body, but in fact
10
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra
11
becomes or is the body. I can thereforc point to my nose and say, "This is my body,”
and there will be no disagreement, with the possible exception that someone might
say, “It is only a part of your body.” This is true; it is a part of my body, but at the
same time it is my body. To insist that it is only a part is to fall into a fallacious view
of the whole as an independent and subsisting entity to which parts belong. The bell
tower on the Riverside campus of the University of California is not somcthing which is
added to an already existent campus. It is the campus. Thus the part and the whole in this
sense are one and the same thing, for what wc identify as a part is merely an
abstraction from a unitary whole.
But in what way can it be said that the nose is identical with my left elbow? We may
understand that in a sense a part is identical with the whole as a whole, but
identifying part with part raises difficulties, for the two parts look different, are spatially
distinct, and perform different functions. The postulation of identity does not remove
these distinctions, and Hua-yen insists that not only are things both identical and
different, but, paradoxically, that they are identical because they are different. In other
words, to have the body I now have, I need a nose which is between my cyes and
has the office of detecting odors, an clbow which bends in a certain way, allowing
me to write and the like, a heart in my chest which pumps blood, and so on. If
everything was literally a nose, I would be just one immense nosc; in fact, I could
not be "me" for even one second. Thus each individual is required in its own
unique form, with its own unique function, to act as a condition for the whole in
question. The identity of the nose and the left elbow consists in their identity as
conditions for the whole. Therefore, while the two are different, they are the same; in
fact, they arc identical precisely because they are different. Seen in this light, then,
when the nose is understood for what it is, the whole body is known; when we know
the nature of the body, we know what the nose is. For this rcason, Hua-yen can say
that ten thousand Buddhas can be seen preaching on the tip of a single hair. In other
words, the one truth which is common of all things (ten thousand Buddhas) is evident
in the tip of the hair once we know its place in the whole.
The reader is bound, at this point, to interpose in exasperation, “Very well, they are
all the same as conditions, but nevertheless, life and death don't appear to be the
same to me!" Certainly they scem different. One moment the loved one is talking
with us, his cheeks pink with life, loving and caring for us, and the next moment he
lies still, pale in death, never more to laugh, lovc, or care again. Is there no difference?
Does nothing happen when the hard-headed, practical tiger cats the mystical yogi?
Yes, of course something happens, the Hua-yen Buddhist agrecs that some thing
docs. The yogi really dies and becomes part of the tiger (though this is
not the kind of identity insisted upon by Hua-yen). Now, we may go out and shoot
the tiger so he won't eat any more people, but we are still left confronting the
question of the place of tigers in the world, and our attitude here is going to
determine whether our own private existence is going to be a success or a failure.
It is the human habit to reject such things as hungry tigers, or their equivalents
cancer, bullets, or the slow, insidious, but equally effective tiger of old age. We
would have nothing but sunshine, sweet wine, eternal youth, and endless satis
factory amours. Intellectually we know that tigers are real and do exist, but
emotionally we reject them with fear and loathing, and we would rather that they did
not exist. They are somehow intruders in the sacred circle of life, foreign agents
sent to subvert our happiness. They are antilife. It is this very picking and choosing
which brings back upon ourselves anxiety, fear, and curmoil, for by dividing up the
one unitary existence into two parts, the good and the bad, we distort the reality
which is the one unitary existence. That is, we blind ourselves to the fact that
existence in its totality is both life and death, success and failure, health and sickness.
Tigers are not foreign intruders but facts of life.
Both life and death are part of the one everchanging process we call being (which is really a
"becoming”) and thus both are conditions for that being. To see things in a totalistic
perspective means to transcend a small, pathetic subjec tivity and see all the
pernicious, vexing contraries harmonized within the whole. As D.T. Suzuki said in his
commentary on Basho's haiku

Lice, fleas The horse pissing Beside my pillow Beside

-

the real world is a world of lice as well as butterflies, horse piss as well as vintage
champagne, and to the person who has truly realized this one is as good as
the other, 3 To insist otherwise is to make an impious demand of existence which it
is unwilling and unable to satisfy. The "ugly" things of life exist, and the only question
is how we are to confront them. The romantic hero smashing himself to pieces
against the stone wall of necessity has never found favor in Asian literature.
This matter of identity can be explored in more depth if we turn to the matter of
interdependence again, for the two relationships are so inextricably related
themselves that one cannot be understood without the other. In returning to the
nose, let us examine it in its dynamic relationship with thc body-totality. Now, this humblc
organ is, according to Hua-yen, the total cause for the rest of the body. Since, as was
pointed out, the “rest” is an assemblage of parts, this
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Hua-yen Buddhism
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means that the nose causes my right elbow, my left knec, and so on. This is, admittedly, a
highly unusual way of looking at a nose, and it is true that if in this analysis of cause
and result we stopped completely with the assertion that / the nose causes the
body, this would be a very questionable assertion indeed. Moving from this
example to the Hua-yen cosmos, this would be tantamount to saying that a drop of
water in the Nile River is the cause for the whole universe. Mysticism indeed! But
the issue of one sole causal agent is not being discussed here, and, in fact, part
of the function of Hua-yen thought is to destroy the fiction of a sole causal
agent. The apparent absurdity of arguing that the nose causes the rest of my
body arises from the sheer necessity of examining the rela tionship of each
part of the whole to the whole in a linear manner, one part at a time in sequence.
If we move to another part of the body, the left index finger, let us say, we can now
assert that the finger is the cause for the body. This does not cancel out the causal function
of the nosc; the reality of the situation is that any part can be said to assume the role of total
cause when the relationship is examined purely from the point of view of the one
part being examined. At this point, it might be assumed that the Hua-yen masters
are making a rather commonplace observance, that a whole is the result of the
collaboration of many individual parts cach exerting its own partial causal
power. However, this is not the case, and Fa-tsang, in his Hua-yen i-ch'eng chiao i
fen-ch'i chang, says that if this were the casc,
be said that that part of the whole is the sole cause for the whole. When referring to
causality, Hua-yen is not making the naive assertion that first there is, let us say, a nose,
and then later the rest of the body comes into existence as a result of the prior condition of
the nose. Time is not involved, nor is there a question of production of a result from a
cause in a progressive series of events. The real question concerns the relationship
existing between simultaneously existing individuals. Whether a totality is
composed of two parts, a million parts, or an infinity of parts, causality in the
sense meant by Hua-yen refers to a relationship among present entities.
The totality we have been looking at is nothing more than a number of simultaneously
existing individuals, and since the relationship of support and supported always
exists between any one individual and all other individuals, or the whole, it would
seem clear that not only does the individual support the whole, but upon a more
complete investigation it can be seen that what is a cause or support from one
point of view is result or the supported from another. The categories of support and
supported, or cause and result, are completely Auid and interchangeable, becoming
either as the point of view shifts. It is the no necessity of point of view which in fact
obscures the real status of the individuals which comprise the whole. They are all
simultaneously cause and result, or support and supported, for this is precisely the
picture of existence which Hua yen hopes to describe: a universe which is nothing
but the complete mutual cooperation of the entities which make it up.
It may be well to try to clarify the sense in which Hua-yen uses the term "cause” at
this point. The description of the intercausal or interdependent nature of the
parts of the body illustrates the magnitude of the relationships as well as the
nature of that relationship, but the meanings of “cause," "condition," “support,"
and other terms have not been discussed at much length. As has already been
mentioned, “cause" is not used here in the popularly understood sense of a
temporal sequence of events in which if an antecedent event is present, a sub
sequent event will occur. Perhaps the Hua-yen use of the term will become clearer if
we resort to a model of an even simpler kind. Let us take a tripod. If we bind three
poles together near one end and then stand the three poles up on out spread legs,
the tripod will remain standing. Here the tripod is a whole, which is of course
composed of parts. If, now, one of the poles is removed, the other two poles will
topple over. This toppling action is not meant, however, to show what happens to
the whole when a part is removed, but rather shows that in order to be that whole
it needs this one pole. Obviously the universe does not collapse when one
individual member dies, but it is no longer that particular whole it was when the
individual survived. Now, if we label the three poles
there would be the errors of annihilationism and eternalism. If (each part) does not
wholly cause (the whole) to be made and only exerts partial power, then each
condition would only have partial power. They would consist only of many
individual partial powers and would not make one whole, which is annihilationism. ...
Also, if (the part) docs not wholly crcate (the whole), then when one (part) is
removed, the (whole) should remain.
However, since the whole is not formed, then you should understand that Ath
the (whole) is not formed by the partial power (of a condition] but by its total
power.

Thus according to the Hua-yon school, the part exerts total power in the
formation of a particular whole.
In a later chapter devoted to intcrcausality alone, the problem of sole causal
power residing in any individual part will be discussed in more detail. Here, in a
general description of the Hua-yen world view, it will suffice to say that when we move
to every part of the body, to every organ, limb, cell, or subcellular particle, and
in each case analyze the relationship of that part to the whole body, it can

14
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra
15
a, b, and c and remove pole a, the falling of thc remaining two poles shows that
from the point of view of a, it has complete power to form the tripod. However, if we turn
our attention to pole b, now that polc, from the new point of view, is said to be
completely responsible for the whole tripod. What has happened to a? Seen from the
point of view of pole b, it is result, or that which is supported. Since a tripod is three
interdependent poles, each of the three parts is simulta neously acting as cause or
support for the whole tripod and yet is indubitably part of a whole which is being
supported.
It is to be admitted that the term “cause” is being used in an unusual manner in these
examples, since what is cvident is that these are all examples of what might better be
called interdependency or mutual conditionedness. Yet, Fa-tsang and other Hua-ycn
masters do usc the word "cause," and the Hua-yen universe is a universe of self-
causation. The traditional term to describe such a situation is fa-chiai yüan-ch'i, which
seems to be a translation of the Sanskrit dharma dhātu pratītya-samutpāda, translated
cither as the “interdependent arising of the universe," or, perhaps better, the
“interdependent arising which is the universe,” since all that exists is part of the onc great
 scheme of interdependency. Bertrand Russell said that the only reasonable definition of cause
would be the sum total of all existent conditions, in the sense that any event will occur unless
any one of the available conditions fails. It is in this sense that we should understand the Hua-
yen use of the word, for in the Hua-yen universe, the individual will be, and will
perform its function, unless some other individual withdraws its support.
One of the most important implications of such a view is that every single thing in the
universe comes to have an important place in the scheme of things. *In the “Great
Barn," every rafter, shingle, and nail is important, for where can we find a barn apart
from these things? This apparently insignificant shingle I see there in the building is a
necessary condition for the barn, and in fact, it is the barn. Yet, what do we mean by
“shingle”? It is not a shingle outside the context of the barn of which it is a part, for “shingle”
only has meaning in its proper context. It is truc that there is no building without this little
shingle, but it is cqually evident that "shingle” has neither existence nor meaning outside the
barn of which it is a part. They make and define cach other.
To make one morc analogy in a rather long scries of analogics, existence is something
like an old-fashioned American square dance. In the squarc dance, what I am and what I do
are completely defined by my inclusion in the square dance, for obviously I am
nothing apart from it. My being, and my office, can be seen as being nothing but
functions of the dance in which I cxist. However, where is the squarc dance without mc,
and “I” am every member of the dance? I am the square dance. Thus we have a
profound, crucial relationship hcrc; that
I am, and that I am defined in a certain way, is completely dependent on the
other individuals who comprise the dance, but this dance itself has no existence
apart from the dancer. The Buddhist, in viewing things as being interdependent in
this manner, comes to have, ideally, a profound feeling of gratitude and respect for
things, however humble they may appear to people who do not share his
understanding, for in some manner that eludes the rest of us, he is aware that
what he is depends utterly upon them.
Having taken this brief look at the doctrine of interdependence, we may now return
to the matter of identity, as perhaps more problematic than the matter of
interdependence. Yet, there is finally no real problem, because identity” is only
another way of saying "interdependent”; they are one and the same. The point to the
doctrine of interdependence is that things exist only in interdependence, for things do
not exist in their own right. In Buddhism, this manner of existence is called
"emptiness” (Sanskrit sünyatā). Buddhism says that things are empty in the sense that they
are absolutely lacking in a self-essence (svabhāva) by virtue of which things would have an
independent existence. In reality, their existence derives strictly from
interdependence. If things possessed essences or substances of a
metaphysical nature, then there truly would be real, ultimate differences
between things. However, if each experiential datum, whether material or mental,
 derives its existence and meaning purely through its dependence on
everything else, then it is not ultimately unique at all, but must be seen as identical
with everything else in its emptiness. Thus to be identical with everything else means
to share in the universal interdependence, or intercausality, of all that exists.
If the reader objects that he still perceives a vast difference between good and
evil, or Buddhas and ordinary folk, or life and death, he need not be surprised, for
to be human means to perceive these differences. However, the Buddha insisted
that to be attached to these meanings in such a manner brought disaster to
the individual. It is the perennial teaching of Buddhism that such attachment will fill his
heart with desire and loathing, make his life a ceaseless hell of turmoil (duḥkha), madden
him, and finally send him to his grave confused, bitter, and afraid.
Identity can be thought of as the static relationship among things, while
interdependence is the dynamic relationship; they are two sides of the same coin, and
both are alternate ways of saying that all is empty (sarvam sūnyam). It is on the
basis of this doctrine of emptiness that Hua-yen insists on a totalistic view of things.
Totalism has two meanings, First, it means that all things are contained in each
individual. The nose, in its identity and interdependence with the rest of the body, takes
in the whole body, for whatever is true in the ultimate sense concerning the nose is also
true of the whole body. If we know reality in the form

16 . Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra
17
is not so unlikely. At that point, the moral life as conceived by Buddhism becomes possible.
University students today do not find the Buddhist concepts of emptiness and interdependent
existence (which are the same thing) difficult to understand, as they might have been a
generation ago and morc. Much more conversant, if even in an elementary way, with
scientific and philosophical trends, they can see fairly easily that the very old
Western assumptions about substances, selves, agents, and the like, are no longer
tenable, or are at least open to serious doubt. Their intellectual world is a different
one from that of even the previous genera tion. They feel much more at home with
such startling concepts as the unified field and the ecosphere. They have begun to
appreciate, however dimly, that in some real sense, everything is alive and exerting
its influence on everything else, that even dead things are alive. They agree with
the Cheyenne chief Old Lodge Skins in the novel Little Big Man, who, asked if he
hates white people, says,
of one phenomenon, then we know all of reality. It is for this reason that Hua
yen can make the seemingly outrageous claim that the whole universe is
contained in a grain of sand. However, not only does the one contain the all,
but at the same time, the all contains the one, for the individual is completely
integrated into its environment.
Second, totalism refers to a manner of experiencing events in which room is
allowed for all kinds of events, and in which nothing is excluded as alien or "bad," as
was discussed earlier. This is difficult to accept for the person unaccustomed
to Eastern thought, for it demands of him that he make room not grudgingly
or fatalistically, but joyously and with profound gratitude, for the horse urine
and lice that do in fact coexist with fine champagne and beautiful butterflies. The
totalistic view sees these as no less real, and no less wonderful, once we have
transcended a petty, partial view of existence in which our comfort and unslakable thirst
determine what has and has not a right to exist. In the totalistic universe, which is
one organic body of interacting parts, it is an act of self-defeating madness to
insist on a never-ending diet of vintage champagne, sunshine, and laughter, and to insist
vehemently and with no small amount of hubris that urine, darkness, and tears be
banished forever. In every contest, there has to be of necessity both a winner and a loser
(granting an occasional draw), and all that Hua-yen asks is chat we realize, and
appreciate, the fact that we cannot ever have one without the other. The partial view would
have only one or the other; the totalistic view sees that the two always go together.
The totalistic world as described by Hua-yen is a living body in which each cell derives
its life from all the 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 comprchend how a modi
fication 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 trec in India some
how 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
"No.... But now I understand them. I no longer believe they are fools or crazy. I know now
that they do not drive away the buffalo by mistake or acci dentally set fire to the
prairie with their fire-wagon or rub out Human Beings because of
misunderstanding. No, they want to do these things, and they succeed in doing them.
They are a powerful people.” He took something from his beaded belt at that point
and, stroking it, said: “The Human Beings believe that everything is alive: not
only men and animals but also water and carth and stones and also the dead
things from them like this hair. The person from whom this hair came is bald on
the Other Side because I now own his scalp. This is the way things are.
"But white people believe that everything is dead: stones, earth, animals, and
people, even their own people. And if, in spite of that, things persist in trying to
live, white people will rub them out."'S

We have for a long time smiled at such assertions as being the superstitions of
"primitive" people, prelitcratc, simple folk who have a tendency to invest every
thing with spirits. Yet people far more sophisticated (according to our usual standards)
have said as much. Faraday, over a hundred ycars ago, made the startling remark
that an electric charge must be considered to exist everywhere, and Alfred North
Whitehead, commenting on this statement, paraphrascd it by saying that the
modification of the electromagnetic field at every point of space at each instant owing to
the past history of each electron is another way of stating the same fact."6 Faraday,
the American Indian, and the Buddhists of the Hua
18
Hua-yen Buddhism
The Jewel Net of Indra
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it.” Spending four or five hours on this incident he told me how I should
practice. At that time I was seven or eight years old. His guidance at that time really
soaked in. From that time on, I became very careful and meti culous about everything.?

In the Hua-yen universe, where everything interpenetrates in identity and inter

dependence, where everything needs everything else, what is there which is
not valuable? To throw away cven a single chopstick as worthless is to set up a
hierarchy of values which in the end will kill us in a way in which no bullet can. In the
Hua-yen universe, cverything counts.
yen are all, in their own way, making the observation that nature is not at all dead, but rather
is most vital. It is certainly not a case of animism or spiritism, but, whatever may be the basis,
a realization that even things commonly thought to be dead or inanimate exert a
continual, crucial influence on each other.
The work of earlier physicists such as Faraday and Maxwell, and later men such
as Einstein, as well as Whitehead with his process philosophy, and others, have
all laid the groundwork for an entirely new understanding of the nature of
existence, and this understanding is gradually beginning to filter down to the
layman. Thus, as I remarked carlier, the intellectual grasp of such Buddhist concepts
as emptiness and interdependence has become much easier and much more
prevalent, so that the university student is not absolutely baffled by these ideas. So
much that is in the air in Western thought coincides in general outline with Hua-yen
cosmology that what might have once passed for bad thinking by Oriental “mystics”
can now be discussed seriously.
My concluding point is that intellectual grasp is not enough, according to all that the old
Buddhist thinkers have had to say. They did not intend their treatises to be mere
theoretical exercises, to be read, understood, and filed away in the great dust bin of
the mind. The Hua-yen vision was first of all meant to tantalize the reader and lure
him to realize (i.e., to make real in his everyday experience) what had been only theory.
To rcalize the Hua-yen universe means to go beyond an intellectual grasp of the
system to a lived experience of things existing in this manner, for the Hua-yen
world view is nothing if not a lived reality. To live this reality in turn means to alter
drastically one's moral and ethical stance as they relate to the infinite other. The
final chapter of this book will examine some of the implications of the Hua-yen world view
for practice and ethics, but here, in conclusion, a story told by a Buddhist priest may give
some idea of what it means to live the Hua-yen vision.

That I have been able to cstablish myself as well as I have has been totally because of my
teacher's guidance. It was customary for him to visit the shrines of various
guardians, placed around the grounds of the temple, every day after the morning
service. One morning while he was making his rounds, he discovered a single
chopstick in a drain. He brought it back, called me to his room, held out the
chopstick to me and asked, "What is this?" I replied, "It is a chopstick.” “Yes, this is a
chopstick. Is it unusable?” he asked further. "No," I said, "It is still usable.” “Quite so,"
he said, “And yet I found it in a drain with other scraps. That is to say, you have
taken the life of this chopstick. You may know the proverb, 'He who kills another
digs two graves.' Since you have killed this chopstick, you will be killed by