Indrajalam
Definition
Sanskrit "Indra's Net," a cosmological image of a vast lattice of jewels in which each jewel reflects every other. Used in the Atharva Veda and developed extensively in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra of Mahāyāna Buddhism as the figure of universal interconnection.
Literal meaning
Sanskrit इन्द्रजाल, from indra (the Vedic king of the gods) and jāla (net, snare, lattice). The compound names the cosmic web stretched across the heaven of Indra. In a secondary sense the term names magic or illusion, the play of appearance produced by the net's reflections.
Esoteric meaning
Indrajalam is the closest direct cosmological cognate to the working language Net. Each jewel in the lattice contains the reflection of every other jewel, so the structure encodes total mutual implication: any one node carries the imprint of the whole, and the whole is constituted by the reciprocal reflection of all the nodes. The Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism systematized this image as the teaching of li-shi wu-ai (mutual non-obstruction of principle and phenomenon) and shi-shi wu-ai (mutual non-obstruction of all phenomena).
Extended meaning
The Avataṃsaka Sūtra presents the image at length in the Gandavyuha section, where the youth Sudhana sees the net during his visit to the tower of Maitreya. The Huayan patriarch Fazang (643-712 CE) used a hall lined with mirrors and a single candle to demonstrate the principle physically. Francis Cook's Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (1977) is the standard English-language scholarly treatment.
Comparative tradition
The working language Net (Nēthar). Norse Yggdrasil with its interconnected nine worlds. Kabbalistic Tree of Life with its Sefirot as nodes of mutual influence. The lattice-of-mutual-reflection image recurs whenever a tradition needs to articulate that the cosmos is not a hierarchy of separate things but a network of mutual constitution.
Science correspondence
Holographic principle in theoretical physics (Gerard t Hooft 1993, Leonard Susskind 1995). Network theory and small-world graphs (Watts and Strogatz 1998). Quantum entanglement as non-local correlation. The mathematics of these modern frames has the same structural property that Indrajalam articulates symbolically.