Huayan

So emptiness is empty, right? Now, of course, you can, you know, blow your mind on trying to really work this out, but it's important to see that emptiness doesn't become another kind of ontology.

The other interesting thing when it comes to Zen is that, um, uh, these ideas would become central to the Huayan or Huayan, excuse me, the Huayan school, which is what the, uh, Avatamsaka Sutra, which I talked about on, uh, Wednesday, is all about.

Um, and, uh, this is where the metaphor of Indra's net comes from.

That you have an infinite net of, of jewels, each one reflecting every other jewel within itself.

Um, and so that's where you get also a very complicated [laughs] philosophy that comes from this as part of Huayan.

Uh, mutual interpenetration.

Each phenomena contains, and is contained by all others, without obstruction.

That's a good point.

And I'm going to give a... an eight-week class on time in January, and I'm going to start with the indigenous attitude, the Lakota attitude, and then I'm going to go to early Buddhism, and then I'm going to go to Dogen, and then I'm going to go to Huayen, and then Dogen, and then I'm going to end with the existentialist Martin Heidegger.

So they all deconstruct our our separation from time in a way that helps us not be caught.

But each culture has its own convention about time.

[laughs]

Well, you know, I, he, um, he, I've been thinking about it, that more recently because the five ranks devised by Dongshan, you know, most people agree hi- historically that that was kind of an extension of the Huayan school, the one is all, all is one philosophy of the Huayan school, where each, each phenomenon embraces the, the universal principle and vice versa.

Mm-hmm.

And that philosophy had been in Mahayana Buddhism, and that it ki- that school kind of died out because it didn't, uh, emphasize practice.

You know, when it comes to k- infinite cosmic power, the vision, I've talked about this incredible cosmic vision.

There's the idea of Indra's net, which is explicit in the Avatamsaka Sutra, and became part of the Huayan, uh, school of philosophy in China, which is, a lot of Zen came, from my understanding, it's from Huayan.

Um, uh, but Indra's net is this cosmic vision of codependent arising.

Like a net of jewels, all things are interrelated.