"The Empress Wu, who had difficulties understanding the Hwa Yen philosophy, asked Fa Tsang, one of the founders of the school, to give her a simple, practical demonstration of cosmic inter-relatedness. Fa Tsang took her to a large hall, the entire interior of which - the walls, ceiling, and floor - was covered with mirrors. He first lit a candle in the centre of this hall and suspended it from the ceiling. In the next moment, they were surrounded by myriads of glowing candles of different sizes reaching to infinity. This was Fa Tsang's way of illustrating the relationship of the One to the Many.

He then placed in the center of the hall a small crystal with many facets. Everything around the crystal, including all the countless images of candles, was now collected and reflected in the small interior of the brilliant stone. In this way, Fa Tsang was able to demonstrate how in Ultimate Reality the infinitely small contains the infinitely large and the infinitely large the infinitely small, without obstruction. Having done this, he pointed out that this static model was actually very limited and imperfect. It was unable to capture the perpetual, multidimensional motion in the universe and the unimpeded mutual interpenetration of Time and Eternity, as well as past, present, and future. [link to books.google.co.uk]

Indra's net" is a phrase found in Kegon go-kyo sho (The Book of Five Doctrines of the Kegon Sect), a book that interprets the Avatamsaka Sutra "The barrier gate of Indra's net" is "a teaching that the world is like the orbs of the mesh that forms the net of the diety Indra, which are in an endless relationship of sosoku and so'nyu." Sosoku means all things come together and become one; so'nyu expresses an all-inclusive relationship whereby A both contains B and is contained by B. In other words, the image is of the knots of the net that join orbs of infinite number which all mirror each other in a relationship that continues forever. This metaphor, that each orb contains a universe and each orb is connected with every other, represents the intricate view of the universe held by Mahayana Buddhism.