Indra’s Net

by Sharik

Posted to Action Poetry on 2001-05-19 21:03:00

Parent message is 19424
It’s Indra’s Net. All that has happened is that you have become a Buddha.

As Brian Green wrote in The Elegant Universe:

… In the raw state, before the strings that make up the cosmic fabric engage in the orderly, coherent vibrational dance we are discussing, there is no realization of space or time. Even our language is too coarse to handle these ideas, for, in fact, there is even no notion of before. In a sense, itÂ’s as if individual strings are ‘shardsÂ’ of space and time, and only when they appropriately undergo sympathetic vibrations do the conventional notions of space and time emerge.

This is like the metaphor of Indra’s Net in the Avatamsaka Sutra. Wrote Charles Eliot in his 1969 book “Japanese Buddhism:”

In the heaven of Indra there is said to be a network of pearls, so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact is everything else. ‘In every particle of dust, there are present Buddhas without number…Â’

And finally, Zen Master Dogen:

Man disposes himself and looks upon this disposition [as the world]. That man is time is undeniably like this. One has to accept that in this world there are millions of objects and that each one is, respectively, the entire world–this is where the study of Buddhism commences. When one comes to realize this fact, [one perceives that] every object, every living thing is the whole, even though it itself does not realize it. As there is no other time than this, every time-being is the whole of time: one blade of grass, every single object is time. Each point of time includes every being and every world.

— Sharik