ence of metaphysical levels is the ultimate reality. Fa-tsang described this in a
number of famous metaphors. Reality is a hall of mirrors endlessly reflecting
one another; a circle of views through multiple gates, each in turn becoming
the center; a web of jewels, each of which reflects not only the other jewels
but also the reflections in each other jewel, an infinity of infinities. This last
image, the famous “Indra’s net,” is reminiscent of Leibniz’s universe of win-
dowless but interconnected monads. Whereas Leibniz posits a “horizontal”
mutual constitution of phenomenal attributes among substances of the world,
the Hua-yen stresses the “vertical” mutuality of transcendence and appearance,
and the ultimate reality of change.
On the phenomenal level, too, everything interpenetrates. But this comes
about because the nature of everything is identically empty. The transience of
any particular thing is the same as the transience of anything else. In this way
the tip of a Buddha’s hair (or anything else) “contains the whole universe.”
Hua-yen has something in common with a philosophy of continuous flux, a
Heraclitean vision in which the logos itself is downgraded into one more item
in the metaphysical net. Hua-yen is far more metaphysical than the indigenous
Chinese flux philosophies, such as the Yi Ching Great Appendix, since Hua-yen
undercuts any constituent elements other than the whole structure itself. Fa-
tsang criticizes any notion of emanation. The world does not originate or flow
from vacuity or nothingness, but is continuously interdependent with it. There
is no emanation of the “many” from the “one”; one and many, totality and
part, mutually imply each other, and cannot exist apart from each other
(Cleary, 1983: 35). The cosmologies of the Sung Taoists and early Neo-Con-
fucians, with their T’ai chi (“Great Ultimate”) giving rise to yin and yang, and
thence onward through the hexagrams and their combinations, are thin and
concrete in comparison to the subtle metaphysics of Hua-yen.
Unlike Consciousness-Only, Hua-yen philosophy was extremely successful.
It enjoyed precedence at court, and was strong enough to have an internal split
(between 263 and 264 in Figure 6.2) in the mid-to-late 700s, spreading over
the attention space at a time when most other Buddhist schools were disap-
pearing.
The last important Hua-yen master, Tsung-mi, came five generations after
Fa-tsang. By this time, the early 800s, the crumbling of T’ang government and
the increasingly precarious position of court Buddhism had left only the de-
centralized schools, Ch’an and Pure Land, as organizationally viable. The
textually oriented schools could no longer support their grand philosophical
visions alone and went looking for allies. Fa-tsang had classified the Buddhist
philosophies into a hierarchy, in effect a metaphysicalization of the hierarchy
of positions in T’ien-t’ai classification a century earlier; indeed, Fa-tsang incor-
porated T’ien-t’ai as a stage, now no longer at the top, but followed by Con-
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 289