金狮子章

简介

According to tradition Fazang, the leading thinker of the Huayan school, wrote this short essay to explain his teaching to Empress Wu Zetian, using a golden lion statue in the palace as an example. In ten brief sections, the gold stands for principle (li), the empty, formless nature of all things, and the lion’s shape for phenomena (shi), which have no existence apart from it. Each part of the lion – eye, ear, every single hair – contains the whole lion, and all parts contain one another, like the jewels in Indra’s net. The essay is a compact introduction to the Huayan doctrine of the mutual interpenetration of all phenomena, and its pair of principle and phenomena was taken up by later Neo-Confucians.