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This paper examines the Huayan teaching of the six characteristics as presented in the Rafter Dialogue from Fazang's Treatise on the Five Teachings. The goal is to make the teaching accessible to those with minimal training in Buddhist philosophy, and especially for those who aim to engage with the extensive question-and-answer section of the Rafter Dialogue. The method for achieving this goal is threefold: first, contextualizing Fazang's account of the characteristics with earlier Buddhist attempts to theorize the relationships between wholes and their parts; second, explicating the meaning Fazang likely attributes to each of the six characteristics; third, situating the characteristics as explicated within Fazang's broader metaphysical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on philosopher Fazang's coin-counter metaphor appear in the Avataṁsaka Sūtra as well as in treatises by the second patriarch of Huayan. It mentions purpose of explicating the metaphor in this way is to redress its relative neglect in discussions of Huayan doctrine and insights from Huayan metaphysics available and more accessible to a wider audience of metaphysician. It also mentions series of attempts to improve an originary example.

Huayan Buddhist philosophers and John Dewey share a perspective on emptiness or dependent origination. This article compares Dewey's local, contextual, and relational metaphysics with Huayan thinkers' use of the metaphor of Indra's jewel net to extend their relational metaphysics to an infinite extent. Huayan thinkers base their ethics of compassion on the recognition of the infinite relatedness of all things. Dewey prefers constructing social institutions that foster experiences that are reliably aesthetically unified. This dispute is significant because pragmatism and Buddhism both provide promising ethical positions based on the understanding of persons as temporally limited and relational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the organic process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and the teachings of Chinese Hua-yen Buddhism. Visions of reality exemplified by the teachings; Parallelism between Whitehead's microcosmic-macrocosmic metaphysics and Tendai Buddhist philosophy.