#huayan

[xi4oyan]

I loved doing this hair for Huayan

[loneberry]

From “The Flower Bank World” in the Avatamsaka Sutra

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.

“In the Huayan school, the teaching of interpenetration is depicted through various metaphors, such as Indra's net, a teaching which may have been influenced by the Gandhavyuha chapter's climax scene in Vairocana's Tower. Indra's net is an infinite cosmic net that contains a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, with each jewel being reflected in all of the other jewels, ad infinitum. Thus, each jewel contains the entire net of jewels reflected within.”

[noosphe-re]

The Buddhist allegory of "Indra's Net" tells of an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time. At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of "Absolute Being" illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net-but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

[wisdom-and-such]

“[One example of a Huayan practice] is the “ocean mirror,” or “ocean seal,” samadhi. In this image, awareness is like the vast ocean surface, reflecting and confirming in detail all phenomena of the entire universe. Waves of phenomena may arise on the surface of the ocean, distorting its ability to mirror plainly; but when the waves subside as the water calms and clears, the ocean mirror again reflects all clearly. Our individual minds are like this, often disturbed by turbulence but also capable of settling serenely to reflect clear awareness.”—Taigen Dan Leighton, read the full article here

[astranemus]

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 implication of Einstein’s theories, that relationship is the more fundamental. As one physicist remarked, if all the matter in the universe less one bundle of matter ceased to exist, the mass of the remaining parcel of matter (and hence its existence) 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-yen masters taught that to exist in any sense at all means to exist in dependence on the other, which is infinite in number. Nothing exists truly in and of itself, but requires everything to be what it is.

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

[divinum-pacis]

Huayan Buddhism - School of the Interpenetration of Phenomena

Huayan (or Hya-yen) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that flourished in Tang Dynasty China and deeply influenced other schools of Mahayana, including Zen.

[wisdom-and-such]

“…the “Entry into the Realm of Reality” (Gandhavyuha Sutra in Sanskrit), relates the journey of the pilgrim Sudhana to a sequence of fifty-three different bodhisattva teachers. These great bodhisattvas present a democratic vision of dharma, as they include women and men, laypeople and priests, beggars and kings and queens. The chapter culminates with Sudhana’s entry into the inconceivably vast tower of Maitreya Bodhisattva, the next future buddha—a lofty, mind-boggling episode that even the special-effects wizardry of George Lucas and his colleagues could not begin to capture. Maitreya’s tower, as extensive as all of space, contains a vast number of equally spacious towers overflowing with amazing sights, each without interfering with the space of any of the others.”  -Taigen Dan Leighton on the ‘Flower Ornament Sutra’ 

read the full article here

[astranemus]

The totalistic world described by Hua-yen is a living body in which each cell dervies its life from all 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 comprehend how a modification 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 tree in India somehow 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 is not so unlikely. At that point, the moral life as conceived by Buddhism becomes possible.

Thomas H. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra