The actual founder of the Huayan school and the most cosmologically imaginative system-builder in the history of Chinese Buddhism, venerated as "National Preceptor Xianshou." With the support of Empress Wu Zetian, Fazang used the Avatamsaka Sutra as his fundamental scripture to construct the magnificent cosmic vision of "Dharma Realm Dependent Co-arising"—the cosmos is not created by any creator or entity but is a web of dependent co-arising in which all things are mutually causal and infinitely interpenetrating. "One is all, and all is one" is the core proposition of his philosophy: any minute thing contains the complete information of the entire cosmos, and the arising of any single dharma simultaneously moves the entire Dharma Realm. He used the metaphor of the golden lion to demonstrate Huayan mysteries to Empress Wu Zetian, and arranged ten mirrors to display the unobstructed interpenetration of all phenomena, translating abstract Buddhist philosophy into intuitive visual imagery.
Courtesy name Xianshou, lay surname Kang, ancestral home Kangju (the Sogdian region of modern Samarkand), 643–712 CE. His ancestors were Sogdians who had settled in Chang'an for generations. Fazang was precocious from childhood; at sixteen he went to the Famen Temple stupa and burned his finger as an offering, vowing to become a monk. The following year he went to Mount Taibai to study the Dao. He later met the Huayan scholar Zhiyan and studied the Avatamsaka Sutra with him, deeply grasping its essential meaning. Before Zhiyan's death, he entrusted Fazang with the mission to glorify the Huayan teachings. During Wu Zetian's reign, Fazang was summoned to lecture on the Avatamsaka Sutra at Taiyuan Temple, and later participated in Yijing's translation bureau. Wu Zetian was deeply interested in Huayan philosophy, and Fazang used the golden lion in front of the hall as a metaphor to demonstrate the Huayan principle of dharmadhatu dependent arising—his lecture notes becoming the "Huayan Golden Lion Chapter." He also arranged ten mirrors facing one another with a Buddha image in the center, demonstrating the Huayan worldview of "one is all, all is one" in which each mirror reflects all others and each reflection contains all others again, endlessly. Fazang lectured on the Avatamsaka Sutra over thirty times in his life and wrote prolifically; his Huayan Jing Tanyuan Ji and Huayan Wujiao Zhang are most important, establishing the Huayan school as one of the most philosophically elevated Chinese Mahayana schools. He died at the Great Fuxian Temple in Chang'an, aged seventy.
Ontologically, Fazang's "dharmadhatu dependent arising" is the core of Huayan philosophy: all dharmas (things) in the cosmos exist in universal, infinite causal interrelation. There is no independent entity and no first cause. The "dharmadhatu" is not a container of things but the dynamic relational whole of mutual causation and mutual inclusion. Cosmologically, the "Ten Profound Gates" and the "Six Characteristics of Perfect Harmony" systematically elaborate this interpenetrating structure: "the gate of simultaneous completeness and correspondence" holds that all dharmas coexist simultaneously in time; "the gate of one and many containing each other differently" holds that one and many mutually contain each other in space; "the gate of Indra's net" uses the net of jewels in the palace of Indra as metaphor—each jewel reflects all other jewels, and each reflection again reflects all jewels, endlessly and infinitely. On the view of truth, "one is all, all is one" reveals the dialectical unity of part and whole, one and many: "When one mote of dust appears, the entire dharmadhatu enters it; when one dharma changes, all dharmas change with it." Part is whole; one is all. This worldview dissolves the dualism of center and periphery, essence and phenomenon, revealing a thoroughly egalitarian cosmos.
"When one mote of dust appears, the entire dharmadhatu enters it; when one dharma changes, all dharmas change. One is all, all is one. — Huayan Golden Lion Chapter; Huayan Jing Yi Hai Bai Men"
If Fazang's "one is all, all is one" is used to analogize the endless intertwining of information in the modern internet and big data, does it display astonishingly prophetic intuition?
Fazang's "one is all" (Indra's net) and Leibniz's "each monad mirrors the entire universe" (pre-established harmony) both depict a cosmic picture in which part and whole mutually contain each other, expressing a strikingly similar organic-holistic worldview through religious metaphor and philosophical concept respectively.
Can the same metaphysical insight be expressed through religious metaphor and mathematical philosophy? Do the holistic worldviews of Fazang and Leibniz converge on the same truth, or do their different metaphysical commitments make them ultimately incommensurable?
Fazang understands the cosmos as a dynamic relational network of dependent arising rather than static entities; Whitehead replaces "substance" with "process" as the ultimate category. Both use a relational, event-based worldview to transcend substance ontology, opening a profound path for East-West philosophical dialogue in the present.
Is process philosophy a genuine alternative to substance metaphysics? Do the relational worldviews of Fazang and Whitehead represent a convergent trend in East and West, or do they remain rooted in fundamentally different intellectual traditions?
Engage in AI soul dialogue with Fazang, or join the intellectual debate arena