The AWAKENING 101 course itself is fairly organized, but if you are inclined to access pages outside the course, of which one can easily do, especially if you are interested in only certain areas or aspects of Buddhism, Zen, or the Enlightenment experience, Sarlo, in his published critique on all my net-based offerings writes:
"It's organic and sprawling, but intricately interlinked, linking also to outside sites. One of the most fascinating aspects of this interconnectedness is that his collection is not very systematic in the usual sense. Forget site map, there is nothing for it when visiting but to wander from one page to another without much sense of where you're going, and usually without completing the page you're on, which you may return to only after a long garden path. In reading, you become a wanderer."
THE NET OF INDRA
GRAPHIC COPYRIGHT GAIL ATKINS
The metaphor of Indra's Jeweled Net is attributed to an ancient Buddhist named Tu-Shun (557-640 B.C.E.) who asks us to envision a vast net that:
- at each juncture there lies a jewel;
- each jewel reflects all the other jewels in this cosmic matrix.
- Every jewel represents an individual life form, atom, cell or unit of consciousness.
- Each jewel, in turn, is intrinsically and intimately connected to all the others;
- thus, a change in one gem is reflected in all the others.
This last aspect of the jeweled net is explored in a question/answer dialog of teacher and student in the Avatamsaka Sutra. In answer to the question: "how can all these jewels be considered one jewel?" it is replied: "If you don't believe that one jewel...is all the jewels...just put a dot on the jewel [in question]. When one jewel is dotted, there are dots on all the jewels...Since there are dots on all the jewels...We know that all the jewels are one jewel" ...".
The moral of Indra's net is that the compassionate and the constructive interventions a person makes or does can produce a ripple effect of beneficial action that will reverberate throughout the universe or until it plays out. By the same token you cannot damage one strand of the web without damaging the others or setting off a cascade effect of destruction.
The above brings to mind the following comment attributed to Larry Darrell, the main character in quest of Spiritual Enlightenment in W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge wherein at the end of the all-important Chapter Six Larry says:
"Nothing that happens is without effect. If you throw a stone in a pond the universe isn’t quite the same as it was before. . . It may be that if I lead the life I’ve planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than a ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third; it’s just possible that a few people will see that my way of life offers happiness and peace, and the they in turn will teach what they have learnt to others." (source)
"Being neither teacher nor guru, and since from the first not a thing is, the most one can do is to offer a glimpse or help point the way. In the end it resides in you"
the Wanderling, Awakening 101
