Interpenetration

Interpenetration is the usual English name for the Huayan teaching of the “non-obstruction of phenomenon and phenomenon”: that every thing in the universe contains, reflects and is present in every other, without losing its own distinct character. It is the fourth and highest of the four ways in which Huayan views reality, beyond the realm of phenomena, the realm of principle, and the non-obstruction of principle and phenomena.

The argument begins from emptiness and dependent origination. Nothing exists by its own nature; each thing is what it is only through its relations to everything else. So each thing holds the whole within it, as its conditions, and is held in turn by every other thing. Fazang illustrated this with the rafter: without the rafter there is no building, so the rafter is in a real sense the whole building, and the building is nothing apart from rafters, tiles and beams.

The image most associated with the teaching is the net of the god Indra, in which a jewel hangs at each knot and reflects all the others, and each reflection reflects all the rest without end. Comparable ideas appear elsewhere: Plotinus describes the intelligible world as one in which each part contains all the others and sees itself in each.