/lit/ - Literature

>>20469715
This necessary interdependent interconnection of everything that exists — you reflecting everything and everyone you experience, as well as being reflected by everyone and everything you experience — everyone and everything else being the necessary ground and condition of, contributing to your existence, as well as you, by your very existence and action and thinking and speaking, having an effect on this existence you find yourself — the observed only existing because there is an observer to observe it, and the observer only existing because there was an observed universe as a necessary precondition of its existence — is beautifully symbolized in texts like the Avamtaksa Sutra, or the Flower Garland Sutra, the foundational text of the Hua Yen School of Buddhism, as “Indra’s net,” a jeweled net or net of pearls of the Vedic deity Indra, in which every jewel is reflected in every other jewel in the net as well as reflecting within itself every other jewel in the net.

And yet, can it be said that this primordial insight is just something that was first “come up with” or “only created and realized” by the writer of the Avatamsaka Sutra?

In fact, you could say that if Buddhism did not exist as the cultural entity we have it now, was not apparently and historically originated by Siddhartha Gautama, it would have to have been created by someone else somewhere else.

If other planets with intelligent extraterrestrial life on them exist, you can imagine that at some point in their history, some philosophical/religious school like Buddhism would have to arise, complete with ideas like those of sunyata (emptiness of self-nature, void, the fact, as Heidegger put it, that “Being” is not a being, is not some “thing” you can point to), the metaphor of Indra’s net, the conception of a Buddha-nature underlying everything, and so forth.

>>16789572
There are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. in each of those 2 trillion galaxies, there are hundreds of billions of solar systems with multiple planets. You really think we're that special?