Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Inspired by [the] Flower Ornament Sutra, the Chinese Huayan teachers were able to articulate a profound dialectical vision that is a part of the foundation for all East Asian Buddhism. The basic teaching of this philosophy of interconnectedness is the Fourfold Dharmadhatu. The first two of these four aspects of Huayan reality clarify the two fundamental aspects of spiritual practice, and indeed of our whole lives: the universal and the particular.  These first two aspects have also been described with the terms ultimate and phenomenal, absolute and relative, real and apparent, or sameness and difference.

The ultimate, absolute reality – the first part of the fourfold dharmadhatu – is glimpsed in introspective meditation; the practice of turning the attention within can serve to deepen awareness of the universal truth. In many religious traditions, seeing the universal oneness or reality is considered the goal of spiritual awareness and practice. But in Huayan Buddhism and in all East Asian Mahayana thereafter, the bodhisattva’s integration of that awareness back into ordinary, everyday activities and reality, into the particular – the second part of the fourfold dharmadhatu – is of crucial importance.  As the eighth century Chan master Shitou (Sekito in Japanese) declared, “Merging with sameness is still not enlightenment.”  Seeing the oneness of the Universal is only half of the practice, if that.  The relevance of this insight must be realized and expressed in the realm of the relative particularities and diversities of our world.

The third aspect of the Huayan fourfold dharmadhatu is the mutual, non-obstructing interpenetration of the universal and particular. Admittedly, this is difficult to take in at first, but with patience we can see that universal truth can only exist in the context of some particular situation.  There can be no abstract universal truth apart from its active presence in the particular circumstance of some specific causal condition.  Also, every individual particular context, when fully examined, completely expresses the total universal truth.  Moreover, the particular being or event and its universal aspect completely interact and coincide without hindering each other. 

Based on this integration of universal and particular, the fourth part of the fourfold dharmadhatu is the mutual, non-obstructing interpenetration of the particular with other particulars, in which each particular entity or event can be fully present and complementary to any other particular.  Viewed from the vantage point of deep interconnectedness, particular beings do not need to obstruct each other, but rather can harmonize and be mutually revealing.  This has significant implications for how we can see our world as a field of complementary entities, rather than a world of competitive and conflicting beings.’ (from the Mountain Source website)

In my work recently, I have been coming across references to the Huayan school and the notion of the dharmadatu (as I have no doubt said before, Wikipedia is usually excellent at spelling out the concepts). Moving on to the four-fold dharmadatu takes us into Dogen territory, it seems.