`The net of Indra is a philosophical metaphor used by the Hua-yen school of Chinese Buddhism', he explained, handing me a piping hot mug of blackberry tea as I set up my Sony tape recorder. 'The Hua-yen flourished around the 7th century during the T'ang dynasty. It's a remarkable school, perhaps the most synthetic and sophisticated of Chinese Buddhist philosophies. They were concerned with the old problem of the one and the many, and with the mutual identity and interpenetration of phenomenal reality. Westerners tend to think that Eastern thought is all about seeing through the illusion of separation and merging with the One. To a degree that's true. But Buddhism, especially the Hua-yen school, also embraces the networked multiplicity of phenomena. Somewhat like Spinoza, they considered each individual aspect of the immanent world as thoroughly positive - from one perspective, each individual possesses a power of absolute activity that brings the whole network online. Of course, they had also absorbed Nagarjuna's radically negative dialectics, so that unlike most Western philosophers, they didn't believe in any abiding substance or monads.'

My eyes were glazing over. He paused. `Look. As Buddhists, they saw that everything was connected, but they didn't want to collapse that interconnected field into a grey and amorphous soup of pure unity. That's the Brahman move, the merging-with-the-one thing. Instead, the Hua-yen sages emphasized that every single thing both reflects and causes everything else in the universe. To demonstrate this to the Empress Wu, Fa-tsang showed her a room completely covered with mirrors. At the center of this room sat a statue of Buddha, whose image was reflected everywhere. The question is simple but profound: one or many Buddhas?'