Adventures Of Sariputta And Mogallana 10: Indra's Net

You are listening to The Adventures of Saraputa and Mogulana.

I'm your host,

Morris Sullivan.

I gave a talk recently to a Unitarian Universalist congregation who started meeting in person again not too long ago.

They're not meeting in their former space.

They happen to be in Palatka,

Florida,

Where there's a beautiful park called Ravine State Gardens.

They moved their church services to an open-air pavilion at the park.

And so I gave my talk in the shade of this pavilion,

Surrounded by nature with birds singing and the blue sky overhead.

And it was really beautiful.

It's a perfect place,

I thought,

To talk about Indra's Net and Oneness.

So I'm going to share that talk with you,

But first I want to tell you about a time when the Buddha and Saraputa realized emptiness and oneness.

And this was during a previous existence.

It comes from one of the Jataka tales.

These are stories about things that happened during the Buddha's previous lives,

In his lives before he was born as Gautama.

In those stories,

He's not yet a Buddha,

Of course,

So he's referred to as the Bodhisattva,

The Buddha-to-be.

There are hundreds of these stories.

Some of them appear in other cultures and in other languages besides Pali and Sanskrit.

So you'll find some of them as Persian tales,

For example,

And things like that.

Some are even relatively modern in origin.

I think you could say that in many cases,

There are folk tales,

Fables,

Things like that,

That were co-opted by Buddhists because they express some moral principle or something along those lines.

Often these stories are told as if the Buddha himself related them.

But probably that's more a storytelling device than anything.

I think the most significant ones are those that discuss how the Bodhisattva perfected virtues in his previous lives that prepared him for becoming a Buddha in his final birth.

And some of these stories will encounter other key figures,

Saraputa and Moggallana,

For example,

As they were associated with him in previous existences.

So here's an example.

So there were some monks who met in the meditation hall and they were talking about Saraputa and about how wise he was.

Apparently the Buddha had said something really profound but very brief.

So it was one of these pithy sayings that he was known for.

And Saraputa had unpacked it later for the monks who had heard it.

Well,

The Buddha came in as they were talking and he said,

Monks,

This is not the first time that Saraputa has brought out the meaning of something I said.

And then he related an incident that had happened long,

Long ago when King Brahmadatta ruled Varanasi.

At the time,

The Bodhisattva was a well-educated priest who had renounced worldliness and gone to live as an ascetic in the Himalayas.

So he lived there in the mountains with 500 followers.

One rainy season,

His chief disciple,

Saraputa,

In this previous existence,

Went with about half the followers from their mountain hermitage to a populated area to get supplies.

While they were away,

The master realized he was about to die and he called his followers together to tell them this.

His disciples wanted to know about his spiritual attainment.

In his time as an ascetic,

What had he won?

Won,

He asked.

I've won nothing.

And with that as his last words,

I have won nothing,

He died.

Well,

His followers were quite disappointed to think that with all of his dedication,

All of his striving,

He had no spiritual attainment.

And so they cremated him without any of the honors that one would normally give a great spiritual leader.

Well,

When the chief disciple returned with the other monks,

He was told that the master had died and he asked,

Well,

Did you ask him what he had won?

And they said,

Yes,

They had,

And he had won nothing.

So they cremated him without any honors.

The chief disciple said,

Oh,

No,

No,

You misunderstood.

The master didn't mean that he hadn't realized anything.

He meant that he had attained the insight into the nothingness of things.

Basically,

He had realized emptiness.

So the chief disciple tried and tried to explain this,

But the followers just didn't get it.

And they continued to express their lack of faith in their departed master.

Meanwhile,

The Bodhisattva had been reborn in one of the Brahma realms,

One of the highest heavens.

He heard this argument going on,

And he decided to clarify the issue.

So he came down from the heavens.

He was hovered in midair above the hermitage and began to praise the wisdom of his chief disciple.

He said,

Far better than a thousand fools who cry out ceaselessly for a hundred years is one who instantly understands what is heard.

And floating there in the air like that,

He proclaimed the truth and he rebuked his followers for their lack of faith.

And then he went back to the Brahma realm.

Well,

Having seen this and understood now,

The rest of his followers went on to practice diligently.

And when their time came,

Each was reborn in the same Brahma heaven.

So I think this is the fourth time I was going to come out here and give this particular talk.

And every time I would be getting ready to go,

And we would have big storms coming in or it would be really cold or whatever.

So I noticed this tropical storm forming out in the Gulf yesterday.

But you know,

What's interesting is that every time then I go back,

I was like,

Well,

I haven't looked at this in three months.

Let me go back and see what I need to do with it.

So I go and tweak it and everything.

It should be pretty good if I can find out.

So when I was a kid,

I hated getting my hair cut.

I did like going to the barbershop though.

I liked it because of the mirrors.

So remember how old fashioned barbershops looked?

The walls in the shop in front of the chairs were just solid mirror.

And the wall behind it was solid mirror too.

And so if you were sitting facing straight into the mirror,

It's no big deal.

You just kind of see your face looking back at you.

But if the chair turned just a little bit,

Then everything would change.

And so I see my face in the mirror in front of me and the mirror behind me was reflecting my face back.

And that went back and forth,

Reflections of reflections of reflections,

Literally into infinity.

And I guess eventually they got so small that you couldn't see them anymore.

But everything was reflected like that.

The barber,

My dad,

The next chair over and all of that.

There's actually a couple of names for that.

One of them is the barbershop effect.

You'll see artists and architects use this idea in what they call an infinity mirror.

But it amazed me.

I thought it was beautiful.

There was something really profound and kind of trippy about it.

And I said something to the barber once about how cool it was.

And he acted like he had no idea what I was talking about.

And he and my dad exchanged one of those,

There's something wrong with that boy looks.

And so I didn't bring it up again.

But it made me wonder if there are not a whole lot of things like that.

Things that we see that are amazing,

But we get used to them.

You see them every day.

We get jaded.

We lose the ability really to be aware of them and aware of how interesting they are.

So I want you to do something for me.

Can you kind of see the sky behind,

Kind of sort of up through there,

There's a sky.

When we get done here,

You can try this outside if you want to.

But for now,

Imagine that you can look up past the tree branches at the sky and even past whatever clouds there are,

There's a few of them up there,

To the great blue beyond.

And imagine that up there beyond the clouds,

There's a big net.

And the net extends across the entire sky.

And then even beyond it,

Past the horizon,

Past where you can see.

Got the idea?

So there's an ancient Indian myth in which Indra,

The king of the gods,

Asked an architect to create something,

An adornment of some kind,

That would inspire everyone who saw it.

And so the architect created this vast net which he hung above Indra's palace.

Up in the sky,

Up in the heavens over the palace,

And it stretched out from that point over the palace infinitely,

Infinitely in every direction.

Span the entire sky and then beyond it,

Beyond anything you can see,

Infinitely everywhere.

And then at each point on the net were two strands joined.

The architect attached a precious jewel.

And as the net extends infinitely in any,

In every direction,

There is an infinite number of glittering diamond-like jewels.

And each jewel is cut in such a way that it reflects all the jewels around it.

And like the mirrors in the barbershop,

It reflects the jewels and the reflections in the jewels on and on.

So it's infinitely times infinite times infinite times infinite.

So not just an infinite number of jewels,

But an infinite number of reflections of reflections.

So you should feel a little bit awestruck by this idea by now.

So now think about this.

If you do one thing that affects one jewel or just a few jewels,

Pluck one of the strands on the web so that it vibrates,

What happens?

In a net,

Every strand of the web connects directly or indirectly with every other strand.

So if you tug on one jewel,

The entire web and all of its countless jewels also change.

There's no way to affect one part of the net without affecting everything else,

Again and again,

Over and over,

Infinitely,

Through this limitless entirety.

So this image of Indra's net appears in a Buddhist scripture called the Flower Garland Sutra.

And it's used in that sutra as a metaphor for oneness,

The principle that everything is connected to and interdependent with and reflects everything.

Everything is within and part of a whole,

And the whole is contained within everything contained in the whole.

So we may feel isolated and apart from one another sometimes,

But we are really one with all existence.

And this can seem kind of abstract,

But if you look carefully at life,

You begin to see the connectedness.

And because everything reflects everything else,

We and our world are infinitely interdependent.

So there was a Chinese monk named Fa Zang.

He was the third patriarch of the Huayan school of Buddhism.

That's a Chinese term that means flower garland.

And without going into a lot of complicated explanation,

Fa Zang in this school of thought gave a lot of importance to the nature of reality and to how you resolve concepts of like emptiness with concepts like eternality of the Buddha and Buddha nature and things like that.

So his conclusions and ways of working with these ideas had a lot of influence on the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism,

Especially Chan,

Which is the Chinese foundation for Zen.

So you don't need to remember any of that.

Fa Zang was a very creative Dharma teacher who found interesting ways to illustrate some of these principles.

And one of his key patrons was Empress Wu.

Empress Wu was notable,

Among other things,

For being the only female monarch in the history of China.

She ruled officially from 690 to 705,

But she had already ruled through her husband.

You know how that works.

And then through her sons.

And so she had sort of unofficially been the ruler of China for about 40 years altogether.

Fa Zang had a very unique way of demonstrating to Empress Wu the principle of interconnectedness,

As illustrated by Indra's net.

I want to do this one of these days.

He had a room built that was very remarkable.

It was square.

But he had mirrors on all four walls and in each corner and on the floor and on the ceiling.

And then in the center of the room,

Right about there,

He placed a Buddha statue with a lamp next to it.

And so the Empress would go into this room and no matter where she looked,

She saw not only the Buddha statue reflected in the mirror,

But also all the other mirrors.

So no matter where she faced,

She saw each reflection and all of its iterations.

So this infinite reflection of reflections of reflections.

And what was especially interesting about that room is that wherever you look,

You see the particular,

The singular object as it appears within the whole.

And each individual mirror contains and reflects everything else.

So this kind of expresses an interesting understanding of reality and its different forms.

And Fa Zang and that school of Buddhism is at least partly responsible for the idea that emptiness is equivalent to the concept of oneness.

So let me explain that a little bit.

So basically there's this attribute of existence called emptiness,

Which says that nothing has an inherent,

Permanent,

Discrete,

Separate self.

So conventionally,

We think we have a self and we tend to think of that as sort of a thing,

Separate from other things,

Which also have some sort of inherent selfness.

But the Buddha saw that what we think of as a self is really a compound of other compounds.

So things that come out of the air,

The water,

The ground,

And so on.

Along with ideas,

Perceptions,

Feelings,

And awareness.

And none of those things are really specifically ours,

Since we're exchanging them constantly with the environment around them.

It's really kind of easy to feel that when you're someplace like this.

And you can see that you're breathing the oxygen created by the trees.

And in turn,

They're taking in your carbon dioxide.

And so we get this sense of being a part of something in this really kind of tangible way.

And all of those things are affected by everything else.

And since everything is constantly changing,

And everything is affected by everything,

Then like the jewels on Indra's net,

We all reflect and are in turn reflected by everything else in the universe.

So this is interesting,

But where does it stop being an amusing intellectual exercise and become something that we can live?

And one of my favorite teachers,

Tanisar Radeku,

Says something interesting about this.

He said,

We can measure our wisdom by the extent to which we can get ourselves to do things we don't like to do,

But that we know will lead to happiness.

And to the extent that we can refrain from doing things that we want to do,

That we know will lead to harm.

So let's see if we can follow that train of thought and see if this can help us do that.

In essence,

Interdependence says that for one thing to be,

Something else has to be.

Like I said,

It's easy to see this out here.

Without the oxygen,

There's no me.

Without the trees,

There's no oxygen.

Without the light,

There's no trees.

Without the sun,

There's no light.

And we can go through the process with the earth and the rain and everything.

And so if you follow this train far enough,

If you pull this string long and far enough and unravel it far enough,

What you find is that remove any one thing and nothing else is here.

So follow those reflections from jewel to jewel to jewel far enough,

And eventually you see that the interconnections are so extensive that probably if you didn't exist,

I wouldn't either.

Everything is ultimately that interdependent.

So this is also where oneness comes in,

That we realize when we look carefully at what we think is myself,

That there's no real actual separation between myself and all the other selves.

And if we take that far enough,

We can use that really to transcend much of the suffering that we experience,

Because much of the suffering we experience comes from the idea that I'm me and I'm not everything else.

There's a famous teaching on emptiness that says that when the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara,

Who's the saint of compassion,

Realized emptiness,

That that was enlightenment.

So knowing emptiness,

He was freed from fear,

Freed from stress that arises,

Clinging from things that are ultimately empty.

So armed with the wisdom of emptiness and oneness,

We can transcend a lot of our difficulties.

We can realize our Buddha nature,

Which is just our true nature,

Our true purpose.

Your Buddha nature is your authentic self,

Free from clinging to ideas like self.

So the problem with Intuosnet is that we are looking at it from inside it.

And so it's hard to see how brilliant it is if you're identifying with one of the jewels in it and not seeing the others as being related.

So we get to be kind of like the barber who no longer sees how amazing the mirrors are.

Zen master Doug had an interesting comment on this in an essay where he really kind of laid out what Zen was about.

He said,

When you ride a boat and you watch the shore,

It looks like the shore is moving.

But if you can keep your eyes closely on the boat,

You see that the boat moves.

And similarly,

If you examine myriad things,

Everything,

With a confused body and mind,

You might suppose that your mind and self are permanent.

But when you practice intimately and return to where you are,

It's clear that nothing at all has an unchanging self.

In other words,

When you look clearly,

When you become still enough to see the entire net of existence and not just your own place in it,

You start to see the whole.

And then he adds something that has become like the classic of Zen teachings.

He said,

To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self.

To study the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

And when that happens,

Your body and mind and the body and mind of others drop away.

So you can experience that just by kind of forgetting yourself as you immerse yourself in your purpose and what you're doing.

Musicians experience this all the time.

And suddenly they'll say,

You know,

I feel like the music is playing me.

And if you've ever done something that you just really love doing,

That you can really fully engage in,

You'll forget yourself for a little while.

And you get into this kind of flow of experience.

So let's come back to earth down here in this beautiful place,

This beautiful garden.

When you pay attention to the natural world,

You start seeing connections between things.

The way the leaf connects to the twig,

The branch to the trunk,

And so on.

You spend a day just noticing how the world,

The natural world and otherwise,

Is put together.

You start to recognize that not much happens without the connections between things.

If you look close enough,

You find that pretty much everything is a connection.

So our spiritual practice is such a connector.

It can connect our intention to our actions.

Without something like mindfulness,

For instance,

Even the best of intentions don't go anywhere.

It's like having a car,

But without the lug bolts to hold the wheels on.

It could be a great car,

But you're going to have a real tough time getting anywhere.

And so sometimes in my tradition,

We'll talk about our spiritual practice as the way of oneness.

We acknowledge our oneness with all beings and our sense of community with all life.

And it's not just we're all one community or whatever.

This is true,

And this is a good thing too,

But it goes beyond that.

We're part of a whole,

And the whole is reflected in us.

Just like Empress Wu's Buddha statue reflected in each mirror,

Which in turn reflects the entirety.

So what one,

There's a psychologist named Ronald Nakasani who talks about this in terms of kind of the ethics of how we live,

And he put it really well.

He said,

What affects one member of the community affects me.

What I do in turn affects every other link in the web.

Tug one strand and the whole web vibrates.

Since we're all inextricably bound together in a community,

What affects one link affects everyone.

The idea of an interdependent universe means that the dignity of all humanity rises and falls with individual actions.

That's kind of the important thing in this,

That the dignity of all humanity rises and falls with our individual actions.

So ultimately we come to understand the universe as an expression of the karma of a universal goodwill that labels,

Labors unceasingly to lead all beings to spiritual peace.

I like that term karma of universal goodwill.

We can see karma working in kind of universal ways that are not always based on goodwill,

But this idea is present in all the world's major religions in one way or another.

It doesn't mean just going around feeling groovy all the time.

It means acting in the world in a way that is loving.

So once you begin to see yourself as the instrument of that karma of universal goodwill,

Then a natural extension of that would be to let your compassion manifest in social action.

The Buddha was kind of an activist.

He encouraged others to practice both for their own benefit and for the benefit of others.

He pointed out that to protect one's own virtue,

In other words,

To your ability to make good,

Strong ethical and moral decisions,

Is to protect others.

And so he equated non-harming as an act of generosity.

In refraining from doing harm,

You give freedom from danger,

From animosity,

And from oppression.

And in giving this gift,

He gains a share in limitless freedom from danger,

Animosity,

And oppression.

I have a friend,

An old friend,

Who posted something on Facebook earlier this week.

He said that he keeps having this dream that he wins the lottery and wins lots and lots of money,

And then he spends the next day going around giving to everybody he knows a million dollars.

And then he wakes up and he realizes it was just a dream and he's very sad.

And so I messaged him and I said,

Well,

Just be nice to everybody.

Because one act of kindness,

You never know,

One act of kindness could be worth a million bucks to somebody.

And if we got to experience the results of all of our kindness,

You know,

Think about what the world would look like if all of your kind acts and their results came back to you in some tangible way.

What would that look like?

It would probably be pretty beautiful when you think about how it compounds and this jewel vibrates,

That jewel and that jewel,

And it's all reflected back to you.

That would be pretty beautiful.

So Duggan said,

All sentient beings are aspects of enlightenment.

Great enlightenment right at this moment is not self,

Not other.

It's not always easy to see this because some sentient beings out there seem like they're anything but awake.

And sometimes our awareness of them shows up first as anger and things like that.

But if I practice with this idea that I'm not separate from others,

Then my actions will arise out of a place of love and compassion.

So thank you very much for your attention.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Adventures of Saraputa and Mogulana.

I hope you enjoyed your time in nature with me today and that you have a chance to visit a nice mountain top or a scenic ravine or otherwise get in touch with the oneness of all creation.

Now go save the world.