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Moving on to Huayan Buddhism Moving on to Huayan Buddhism. Our plan, talk a little bit about the development of Huayan, the crucial ideas of interpenetration and the relational nature of all phenomena. Then we'll look at these two texts which attempt to explain this through extended metaphors. First, we have the Golden Lion and then The Rafter Dialogue. Huayan is a uniquely Chinese form of Buddhism, it didn't exist in India. Though it's based on a text which is supposed to have come from India, there are some doubts about that and this is called the Huayan Sutra or Flower Garland Sutra. It developed in China starting around between the fifth and sixth century and it's most noted philosopher is this monk Fazang who was known as the third patriarch of Huayan. He was quite successful and in fact attracted the attention of the Empress Wu Ze Tian who became an important supporter of his and in fact, was the impetus for the Golden Lion Essay, where she expressed puzzlement about Huayan and asked if Fazang could simplify it. So he gave her the explanation using the golden lion statue in the palace. The key idea is interpenetration, this is the particular Huayan understanding of emptiness. Emptiness, the basic meaning is lack of independent existence and the Huayan take on this, they emphasize how everything is constituted through its relations to other things. This is true of all phenomena, so what their denying is that there's any starting point. Everything is what it is because of its relations to something else. The radical statement of Huayan is that there aren't pre-existing individuals that come into relationships with each other, right? Maybe a common sense way of understanding our relationship, for example, would be, I existed before the first day of East Asian philosophy and you existed for the first day of East Asian philosophy. When you took this course and when it started at the end of January, we had two pre-existing individuals who had a new relationship, we're now professor and student. The Huayan understanding is no, we actually became new individuals through this relationship. We are constituted by our relationship and our relationships with other things. There's no such thing as an individual who comes into a new relationship. The relationship creates the individual. As I create you, and the same way, you create me, we make each other what we are through this relationship. This applies to all relationships that we have with everything throughout the entire universe. That's what the universe is, the universe is the totality of all relations.They explain this, this is what they call the pattern. The pattern is the sum total of all relationships of everything. The universe is these relationships, as new relationships are created, we have a new universe. A common image that Huayan likes to use to explain this is the image of Indra's net. All right, Indra was one of the Hindu Gods and he had this net and at the node of each of the strands, there was a jewel. A very reflective jewel, it's represented here in this picture. You can see how each of these reflects the other jewels. This is the Huayan understanding of how everything is. We're all one of these jewels that reflects everything else. Everything is in us, makes us what we are. What they mean by interpenetration is that I'm not something distinct from everything else. I'm not set apart, but actually everything else in the universe penetrates into me because it makes me what I am. Now this still is a form of Mahayana Buddhism so these phenomena and relations are not ultimately real. The phenomena are not real because they're constituted by the relations. They are not independent of the relations and the relations aren't real because they have to be something that relates. Just to take a very simple example, let's take the relationship between this remote control and this table. Well, their relationship is one is on top of the other this time but you need to have the remote and you need to have the table for them to have that relationship. Therefore, the phenomena depend on the relationships, the relationships depend on the phenomena, neither are independent. Huayan extends this, again, very comprehensively. Everything is part of everything else. We may not feel like it, we may not realize it but we depend on everything in the whole universe. A star a billion light years away, makes me who I am right now, even if I'm not aware of it. Again, their understanding of emptiness is this relationality, this interpenetration, where there's no independent phenomenon that can be identified anywhere. [NOISE] All right, so that's a mouthful. Let's look at the first text, this golden lion, which attempts to make these ideas a little bit more understandable. Fazang was using the example of a lion statute like this, common in Chinese palaces and temples. Again, this is when the empress asked him to try to make sense of Huayan philosophy, it was a little too confusing for her, can't really blame her. The lion and its parts represent phenomena in general. Any particular thing in the universe. The gold, the substance of the lion represents emptiness. This metaphor is trying to explain the relationship between emptiness and phenomena. In the first section of the text, the gold lacks self nature. Gold here represents emptiness. It's not a particular thing because we don't find gold just in itself. Gold has to have a form, has to have a shape. In this case, it's in the form of a lion, doesn't have to be a lion, but it has to be something. At least it's a block of gold or a ball of gold. It has to be in some form, there's no such thing as just gold that doesn't have any shape at all. What we find are gold things, not just gold. We have golden lions, golden earrings, golden silverware. Yes, that would be gold-ware or golden-ware, not just gold. There's no emptiness apart from phenomena. Emptiness is not a thing, that's what Fazang's getting at here. The lion's shape, it has particular causes and conditions. It needs a substance, it needs the gold, it needs someone to shape it, the craftsman who makes it into the statue. It's not an independent thing. All right, so you try to show neither the lion nor the gold are independent. The statue can't be separated from the gold, we can't take the gold statue and say, ''okay let's just take the gold out and we'll leave the statute'', you'd have nothing left. Phenomena cannot be separated from emptiness, these are interpenetrated and intertwined. Emptiness needs to be in something, there needs to be phenomena, emptiness refers to the fact that phenomena are empty. If there were no phenomena, there would be nothing to be empty and phenomena couldn't exist without emptiness. You can't have a lion statue without the gold. It's got to be made out of something. In sections four and five of the text, here Fazang emphasizes that emptiness doesn't change. When you take the lump of gold and make it into a lion, it's still gold. Let's suppose for the sake of argument, that the craftsmen just didn't even take away any of the gold. Used a mold so the exact same amount of gold that he had before is still there, just in a different shape so, there's no change to the substance of the gold, when emptiness becomes phenomena, It doesn't change, it's still empty and that's the point here. Now where things begin to get a little bit more complicated, In section seven, Fazang emphasizes that the parts of the lion are both the same and different. They are the same in that they're all gold. There's no distinction in the substance but they're different because there's one part' s the ear, one part's the eye. There's the mane, they look different. They have different functions so they're simultaneously the same and different. This points to the way phenomena in general are the same and different. They are different in terms of function. My cup has a certain function, the mouse has a certain function, the remote control has yet another function. They're all different but they're all the same in virtue, the fact that they're all empty. Now, this interpenetration idea means we have to think of cause and effect differently. Normally in a common sense understanding is that the cause happens before the effect. How can you have a cause that happens after an effect? That doesn't make any sense. So something like lighting a match, the match, and the match book have to exist before they can be lit. That would be a typical way of understanding cause and effect. But interpenetration means we have to understand it differently. Because in the Huayan understanding of things, that's a different match. The match that's not on fire and the match that's on fire are not the same thing. A way they explain this is through the parent-child analogy. This idea that everything is mutually constituting.
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