By Brendan D. Murphy
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Some 2,500 years ago the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra described the cosmos allegorically through the imagery of Indra’s net. In the heavenly abode of the deity Indra, there was cast an infinite net reaching in all directions, and at each node point in the net there was a jewel, each reflecting the light of all the others—infinitely. Should any jewel be touched, each of the infinite other jewels would instantly be affected, presaging physicist John Bell’s theorem that everything is interconnected in this interdependent universe. In particular, the Buddhist vision illustrates the concepts of dependent origination and interpenetration (all phenomena arise together and are intimately connected “in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect”). “For the Huayan school, Indra’s net symbolizes a universe where infinitely repeated mutual relations exist between all members of the universe.”...
