The net
In the heaven of Indra there is said to be a net that stretches without end in every
direction. At every crossing of its threads hangs a single jewel, and because the net is
infinite the jewels are infinite. Each one reflects every other — and reflects the reflections
in them, and the reflections in those, without a last term.
The point of the image is not the multiplicity. It is that no jewel is the source
of the light, and no jewel is separable from what it shows. Remove one and every
other changes.
Avataṃsaka Sūtra · elaborated by Fazang (643–712) of the Huayan school,
who is said to have built a room of mirrors with a lamp and a small Buddha figure at its
centre to demonstrate it to an empress.
Why each jewel is a torus
A bead of polished glass can reflect, but it cannot take part. A jewel that both receives
and gives has to move: draw in, turn over, release, and do it again without ever running dry.
The smallest form that sustains that is a torus — a flow that returns into its own beginning.
Each node here is a horn torus: every one of its rings passes exactly
through the node's centre. That is why the middle blazes. It isn't a light placed there;
it is the whole field arriving at one point.
The strand runs through the axis
The web does not stop at the jewel and start again on the far side. It runs straight
through the vertical axis — entering below, leaving above — and the torus is the standing
pattern that passage makes as it turns.
So the node does not contain consciousness. Consciousness is what is
passing through, and the node is the shape it takes while it passes. Follow any
strand upward and it threads the next jewel the same way.
Gathering and giving
Follow a single point of light. Along the underside it narrows inward and downward,
converging on the axis; it passes through the core; above the core it turns and opens outward
again, spilling over the crown and falling back down the outside to begin once more.
Centripetal — gathering toward the axis
Centrifugal — flaring away from it
The core, where the two are one motion
These are not two forces in opposition. They are one circulation caught at two moments of
its turn — and at the centre there is no difference between them at all.
Touch a jewel
Select any node. A pulse leaves it along every strand it holds, reaches its neighbours,
and each of those reflects it onward in turn, outward through the net. Watch the
Reflections counter climb from a single touch.
You will find you cannot touch one jewel.
DragOrbit the net
ScrollDraw closer or fall back
ClickTouch a jewel
SpacePause the drift
NovaMake one jewel give everything now
EscRelease and return
When a jewel goes nova
Every half-minute or so, one jewel stops husbanding itself. It gathers
first — watch it contract and dim for a second, drawing in — and then the
axis opens and it gives everything it has at once.
Watch what the rest of the net does. Not a wave rolling politely
outward from neighbour to neighbour: the whole net is lit almost
before the flash has finished. There is a front, and it does travel,
but it crosses the entire structure in about a sixth of a second — so what
you see is much closer to simultaneity than to delivery.
That is the difference between a net and a chain, and it is why the
sutra insists on reflection rather than causation. No jewel had to
be told. Each was already constituted by the one that gave; when
it gave, they were already changed.
The ordinary ripple follows on behind, jewel to jewel at its own slower
pace — the news arriving after the fact.
What this is, honestly
A contemplative model, not a physical theory. The toroidal dynamics here illustrate a very
old metaphor; they are not a claim about how minds actually work, and nothing in current
science says consciousness circulates this way.
What the model is good for is holding two ideas at the same time — that a thing can be
wholly itself and wholly made of everything else — which is
hard to think and comparatively easy to watch.