Francis Cook explains the pragmatic meaning of the net of Indra:
When in a rare moment I manage painfully to rise above a petty individualism by knowing my true nature, I perceive that I dwell in the wondrous net of Indra, and in this incredible network of interdependence, the career of the Bodhisattva must begin. It is not just that ‘we are all in it’ together. We all are it, rising or falling as one living body.
— Cook (1977, 122)
Austin (1998, 499) identifies this experience with the absorption of samadhi. But something very much like the net of Indra appears to Christian visionaries as well.
Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other. They will dissolve again into their own proper root. For the nature of matter is dissolved into what belongs to its nature. Anyone with two ears able to hear should listen!
— Gospel of Mary 2 (King 2003b, 13)
Blake’s vision of eternal meaning space – ‘Mutual each within others bosom in Visions of Regeneration’ (Jerusalem 21:45) – is based on Ezekiel but also features the mutually reflecting nodes of the Net of Indra:
the Four Faces of Humanity fronting the Four Cardinal Points
Of Heaven going forward forward irresistible from Eternity to EternityAnd they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic …
& they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order.Jerusalem 98
Even in Peirce’s late definitions of ‘Sign’ emerges something very like the net of Indra, as a semiotic network in which the whole Sign is both context and object of each part, so that each part is a sign of itself as part of its own object.
The word Sign will be used to denote an Object perceptible, or only imaginable, or even unimaginable in one sense—for the word “fast,” which is a Sign, is not imaginable, since it is not this word itself that can be set down on paper or pronounced, but only an instance of it, and since it is the very same word when it is written as it is when it is pronounced, but is one word when it means “rapidly” and quite another when it means “immovable,” and a third when it refers to abstinence. But in order that anything should be a Sign, it must “represent,” as we say, something else, called its Object, although the condition that a Sign must be other than its Object is perhaps arbitrary, since, if we insist upon it we must at least make an exception in the case of a Sign that is a part of a Sign. Thus nothing prevents the actor who acts a character in an historical drama from carrying as a theatrical “property” the very relic that that article is supposed merely to represent, such as the crucifix that Bulwer’s Richelieu holds up with such effect in his defiance. On a map of an island laid down upon the soil of that island there must, under all ordinary circumstances, be some position, some point, marked or not, that represents qua place on the map, the very same point qua place on the island.
A sign may have more than one Object. Thus, the sentence “Cain killed Abel,” which is a Sign, refers at least as much to Abel as to Cain, even if it be not regarded as it should, as having “a killing” as a third Object. But the set of objects may be regarded as making up one complex Object. In what follows and often elsewhere Signs will be treated as having but one object each for the sake of dividing difficulties of the study. If a Sign is other than its Object, there must exist, either in thought or in expression, some explanation or argument or other context, showing how—upon what system or for what reason the Sign represents the Object or set of Objects that it does. Now the Sign and the Explanation together make up another Sign, and since the explanation will be a Sign, it will probably require an additional explanation, which taken together with the already enlarged Sign will make up a still larger Sign; and proceeding in the same way, we shall, or should, ultimately reach a Sign of itself, containing its own explanation and those of all its significant parts; and according to this explanation each such part has some other part as its Object. According to this every Sign has, actually or virtually, what we may call a Precept of explanation according to which it is to be understood as a sort of emanation, so to speak, of its Object. (If the Sign be an Icon, a scholastic might say that the “species” of the Object emanating from it found its matter in the Icon. If the Sign be an Index, we may think of it as a fragment torn away from the Object, the two in their Existence being one whole or a part of such whole. If the Sign is a Symbol, we may think of it as embodying the “ratio,” or reason, of the Object that has emanated from it. These, of course, are mere figures of speech; but that does not render them useless.)
CP 2.230 (1910)