The Web of Jewels: How Huayan Buddhism Sees Reality

Imagine a net stretching out in every direction, infinitely large. At every point where two strands of the net cross, there is a perfect, polished jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel in the entire net. And here’s the strange part: each jewel doesn’t just reflect the others like a mirror would. Each jewel contains the image of every other jewel. And those images themselves contain images of all the others, including the original jewel, which now appears inside itself, containing all the others again, on and on forever.

This is the image of Indra’s Net, an ancient metaphor from Indian mythology that a school of Chinese Buddhist philosophers called Huayan (pronounced “hwah-yen”) adopted to describe how they thought reality actually works.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds impossible—how can one thing contain everything else, and everything else contain it back?”—you’ve already started doing Huayan philosophy. Because the Huayan thinkers were drawn to exactly that kind of impossible-seeming claim. They thought that ordinary common sense has reality backwards. We normally think of ourselves as separate individuals interacting with other separate things. But Huayan says: look closer, and you’ll find that nothing is really separate. Everything depends on everything else for its very existence and identity, all the way down.

A Rafter and a Building

One of the most important Huayan philosophers, a man named Fazang (643–712), gave a simple example to make this idea concrete. Think of a building and a rafter—one of the wooden beams that helps hold the roof up.

What makes a rafter a rafter? Not its shape or material. If you pulled it out of the building and set it on the ground, it could become a bench, a seesaw, or firewood. What makes it a rafter is its role in the building. The building gives the rafter its identity.

But the reverse is also true: the rafter gives the building its identity. The building is nothing more than the sum of its parts. If you removed the rafter, the building would become a different building—or maybe not a building at all, if enough parts were gone.

So the building is in the rafter (as what gives the rafter its meaning), and the rafter is in the building (as what makes the building what it is). Each one contains the other. And now think about the bricks, the nails, the roof tiles, the windows. Each one stands in the same relationship to every other part, and to the whole. Every part contains every other part and the whole. The whole contains every part.

This is what Huayan philosophers meant when they said “one is all, and all is one.” It sounds like a mystical riddle, but it’s actually an argument about how identity and dependence work.

The Problem of Separate Things

To understand why anyone would believe something this strange, you need to know where Huayan came from.

Buddhism arrived in China from India around the first century CE, bringing with it a core teaching: ordinary life is filled with suffering, and this suffering is caused by the illusion that we have permanent, separate selves. We crave things because we think there’s a “me” that needs to be satisfied. But according to Buddhism, when you really examine your experience, you can’t find any solid, lasting self. Your body changes. Your thoughts come and go. Your feelings shift moment to moment. The “self” is really just a collection of processes that we mistakenly label as “me.”

Different Indian Buddhist schools argued about exactly how to understand this. One school (Abhidharma) said that while whole things like “you” or “a chariot” are just conventional labels, the tiny basic building blocks of reality—called dharmas—are genuinely real. Another school (Madhyamaka) said even those building blocks are empty of any independent existence, because everything depends on causes and conditions. A third school (Yogacara) said that consciousness itself is the fundamental reality, and that what we think of as the external world is really a projection of mind.

When Buddhism reached China, Chinese thinkers did something interesting. Instead of choosing between these different Indian schools, they treated them as partial truths—different levels of understanding, like different grades of a class. The highest, most “rounded” or complete teaching would be one that could include and reconcile all the partial truths below it. This approach, called panjiao, was basically the Chinese Buddhist version of saying, “Everyone’s got part of the picture, but we’ve got the whole thing.”

Huayan was the school that claimed to have that whole picture.

Empty and Full, All at Once

Here’s where it gets tricky. Huayan inherited from the Madhyamaka school the idea that everything is “empty”—that nothing has a fixed, independent nature (svabhava in Sanskrit). But Huayan thought the earlier schools didn’t push this insight far enough.

Think about it: if everything depends on everything else, then each thing is literally constituted by its relationships to all other things. There’s nothing left over. A thing doesn’t have relationships and then some additional core identity. The relationships are all there is.

So Fazang argued that every single thing has what we might call a “mysterious double aspect.” On one side, each thing is empty—it has no fixed self-nature, no permanent essence. On the other side, each thing is fully real—it exists powerfully right now, affecting and being affected by everything else. These two aspects aren’t in conflict. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Fazang illustrated this with the image of building and rafter we talked about earlier. The rafter has “wholeness” because it helps create the whole building. It has “particularity” because it’s a distinct part. It has “identity” with the other parts (they all work together). It has “difference” from them (the rafter is not the brick). It “integrates” the parts into a whole—but it does this all by itself, without needing the other parts to cooperate. This last point is crucial: the rafter creates the whole building, even though it’s just one part. Every other part does the same. The whole building is created by each part, all at once, independently.

This sounds like a contradiction, and that’s kind of the point. Huayan philosophers loved paradoxes because they thought reality itself was paradoxical when you looked at it directly. Our ordinary way of thinking—with clear categories like “one” and “many,” “part” and “whole,” “cause” and “effect”—simply breaks down when you really understand how things depend on each other.

The Golden Lion

The best-known illustration of Huayan philosophy comes from Fazang’s “Treatise on the Golden Lion.” Imagine a statue of a lion made of pure gold.

When you look at the statue, you see a lion. But if you look more carefully, you realize there is no lion there—there’s only gold that has been shaped to look like a lion. The “lion-ness” is an appearance, not a reality. The gold can be reshaped into an ingot, a coin, a bowl, or anything else. The gold itself is what’s real; the forms it takes are temporary and dependent.

Now here’s the step that matters: the ordinary world of separate things—you, me, trees, tables, stars, everything—is like the lion shape. It appears to consist of distinct individuals, but that’s a kind of illusion. What’s really there is something like the gold: the entire network of mutually dependent dharmas, extending through all of time and space, which is the only thing that ultimately exists.

But—and this is critical—you shouldn’t deny the lion either. It’s real as an appearance. You can see it, touch it, talk about it. The mistake isn’t seeing the lion; the mistake is thinking there’s a lion separate from the gold. In the same way, the mistake isn’t experiencing yourself as a separate person; the mistake is thinking there’s a self separate from the web of everything else.

For Huayan, this isn’t just a philosophical theory. It’s supposed to change how you live. If you really understand that you and every other being are just appearances of the same ultimate reality, then selfishness becomes as irrational as a wave thinking it’s separate from the ocean. To harm someone else is to harm yourself. To help someone else is to help yourself. Universal compassion isn’t just a nice idea—it’s the logical consequence of how things actually are.

Why Philosophers Still Argue About This

You might be thinking: “This is beautiful, but is it true? And even if it’s true, can I actually experience reality this way?”

Good questions. Huayan philosophers worried about both. They developed elaborate systems of meditation to try to see reality as interpenetrating, not just think about it. And they debated fiercely about what exactly “ultimate reality” is.

Later thinkers within the Huayan tradition disagreed about important details. Some thought ultimate reality was fundamentally mental—a kind of cosmic consciousness (One Mind) that produces everything. Others thought it was more like a pattern (li in Chinese) that pervades all things. Some thought enlightenment happened gradually, through long practice. Others thought it could happen suddenly, in a flash.

And critics outside Huayan raised serious objections. If everything contains everything else, don’t we lose the ability to make distinctions at all? If the lion is really just gold, why bother caring about the lion at all? If all reality is one, how do we explain conflict, evil, and genuine loss?

These aren’t easy questions, and Huayan philosophers had responses to them that are still studied today. But the fact that they’re hard questions suggests something important: Huayan isn’t a finished theory. It’s an invitation to see the world differently, to notice how deeply things depend on each other, and to wonder whether our ordinary sense of being separate individuals might be, if not exactly wrong, then at least incomplete.

The Net Keeps Going

Huayan Buddhism eventually declined as a separate school in China, but its ideas didn’t disappear. They deeply influenced Chan (Zen) Buddhism, which is still practiced widely today. They also influenced Confucian thinkers who came later, even ones who thought they were rejecting Buddhism. The Huayan emphasis on “principle” or “pattern” (li) became central to later Chinese philosophy, though many people forgot where the idea originally came from.

And the questions Huayan asked haven’t gone away. Modern science has revealed that the universe is far more interconnected than our ordinary senses tell us. Particles that once interacted remain “entangled” across vast distances. Ecosystems are webs of interdependence. Your very body contains more bacterial cells than human cells, and the atoms in your body were forged in ancient stars. Our intuitive sense of being separate, bounded individuals doesn’t match what physics and biology reveal.

Huayan philosophers would probably nod at this and say: “Yes. And it’s even stranger than you think.”

Appendix: Key Terms

Term	What it does in the debate
Dharma	A basic building block of reality—an instantaneous event, like a flash of matter or a momentary thought
Emptiness (sunyata)	The idea that nothing has a fixed, independent essence—everything depends on causes and conditions
Indra’s Net	A metaphor for radical interdependence: each thing (jewel) contains reflections of all other things
Interpenetration	The claim that each thing pervades, contains, and is identical with every other thing
Li (principle/pattern)	The underlying order or reality that pervades all things; the true nature of things when seen correctly
One Mind	The idea that ultimate reality is a single, cosmic consciousness that produces everything
Panjiao	A system for ranking Buddhist teachings by how complete or “rounded” their understanding is
Shi (thing/event)	The everyday objects and events we experience as separate individuals
Suchness (tathata)	Reality as it truly is, before we slice it up with concepts—ineffable and non-conceptual

Appendix: Key People

Fazang (643–712): The third Huayan patriarch, who systematized the school’s teachings, wrote the famous “Golden Lion” essay, and became an influential advisor at the Chinese imperial court. He argued that each thing simultaneously includes, and is included by, all other things.
Dushun (557–640): The first Huayan patriarch, a meditation master who worked with ordinary villagers and wrote the foundational text on the relationship between principle (li) and things (shi).
Zhiyan (602–668): The second patriarch, who wandered the countryside for 20 years preaching before returning to write extensively about the “ten mysteries” of how things interpenetrate.
Chengguan (738–839): The fourth patriarch, who organized Huayan teachings into a system of “four dharma-realms” and defended Huayan against other Buddhist traditions.
Zongmi (780–841): The fifth patriarch, who also became a Chan (Zen) master and wrote about how Buddhism could answer questions that Confucianism and Daoism couldn’t.

Appendix: Things to Think About

If everything contains everything else, does that mean your worst enemy is somehow “inside” you? And you inside them? What would that mean for how you treat them? What would it mean for forgiveness?
Fazang said the rafter creates the whole building all by itself, without needing the other parts’ cooperation. But the other parts also do this. How can something be both a single part and the creator of the whole? Does this make sense, or does it break the rules of logic?
The Huayan claim that “one is all, all is one” sounds like a comforting idea of unity. But it also means that every bad thing contains every good thing, and every good thing contains every bad thing. If everything is in everything, is there any real difference between good and evil anymore?
Many people find the idea of no-self (from Buddhism) scary or depressing. If there’s no “you,” who cares if you suffer? But Huayan turns this around: if there’s no separate self, then there’s no reason to prefer your suffering over anyone else’s. Is that a better way to live? Is it even possible to actually feel that way, or is it just an intellectual idea?

Appendix: Where This Shows Up

Ecology and environmentalism: The idea that everything is interconnected is a core insight of modern ecology. Huayan offers a philosophical framework for thinking about why that interconnectedness matters for how we should live.
The internet: Some people have compared the internet to Indra’s Net—each webpage contains links to others, which contain links back, creating an infinite web of connections. Is this a good metaphor, or does it miss something important?
Zen meditation: Zen Buddhism, which is still widely practiced, inherited many ideas from Huayan. When Zen teachers talk about “seeing into your true nature” or “the unity of all things,” they’re often drawing on Huayan philosophy.
Conflicts with friends: When you’re in a fight with someone, you probably think of yourself as right and them as wrong. Huayan suggests this misses something: your identity and theirs are bound up together. Maybe winning the argument isn’t as important as seeing the whole pattern you’re both part of.