The Universe According to the Huayan School of Buddhism

Such a universe is not at all familiar to Western people. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition and the Greek philosophical tradition have bequeathed to their posterity a view of existence very much different from that conceived by the Chinese. It differs in several respects. First, it has been, and to some extent still is, a universe which must be explained in terms of a divine plan, with respect to both its beginning and its end. The Hua-yen world is completely nonteleogical. There is no theory of a beginning time, no concept of a creator, no question of the purpose of it all. The universe is taken as a given, a vast fact which can be explained only in terms of its own inner dynamism, which is not at all unlike the view of twentieth-century physics. Moreover, our familiar world is one in which relationships, are rather limited and special. We have blood relationships, marital relationships, relationships with a genus or species, relationships in terms of animate or inanimate, and the like, but it is hard for us to imagine how anything is related to everything else. How am I related to a star in Orion? How am I even related to an Eskimo in Alaska, except through the tenuous and really nonoperative relationship of species? I certainly don't feel related to these other things. In short, we find it much easier to think in terms of isolated beings, rather than one Being. Being is just that, a unity of existence in which numerically separate entities are all interrelated in a profound manner. Beings are thought of as autonomous, isolated within their own skins, each independent by and large from all the rest of the beings (both animate and inanimate). The "mystic" who speaks of identity with such things as animals, plants, and inanimate objects, as well as other men, is an object of ridicule. The Hua-yen universe is essentially a universe of identity and total intercausality; what affects one item in the vast inventory of the cosmos affects every other individual therein, whether it is death, enlightenment, or sin. Finally, the Western view of existence is one of strict hierarchy, traditionally one in which the creator-god occupies the top rung in the ladder of being, man occupies the middle space, and other animals, plants, rocks, etc., occupy the bottom. Even with the steady erosion of religious interest in the West, where the top rung of the ladder has for many become empty, there still exists the tacit assumption that man is the measure of all things, that this is his universe, that somehow the incalculable history of the vast universe is essentially a human history. The Hua-yen universe, on the other hand, has no hierarchy. There is no center, or, perhaps if there is one, it is everywhere. Man certainly is not the center, nor is some god.

---Francis H. Cook---