Indra’s Net and the Cosmic Christ

Thich Nhat Hanh needs no introduction. He is my favorite Zen master, who has a talent for expressing very complicated ideas in simple, poetic form. In a short piece called Paper and Clouds, he wrote:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

Yes, if we look deep enough, we can see the cloud, the rain, the forest, and the entire cosmos on a simple piece of paper. This is possible because all things in the universe are necessarily related. In just a short paragraph, Thich Naht Hanh manages to spell out the intricate Hua Yen philosophy of All in one and one in all — in a piece of paper we can see the cosmos, and the cosmos cannot exist without the piece of paper. The individual a reflection of the whole and the whole is a reflection of the individuals. In our daily lives, we tend to think of different things and different events as separate and not connected. Yet, on a deep level, all things have subtle connections. Spirituality has much to do with developing this deeper vision so that we can see the unity in all things.