Casting Indra's Net

What if the universe is fundamentally relational rather than built from isolated parts?

That question appears in many traditions, but one of the most striking expressions is Indra’s net. It is believed to come from the Avatamsaka Sutra (and later writings in the Huayan school of Buddhism), where reality is pictured as an infinite web stretching in all directions. At each vertex sits a radiant jewel. Every jewel reflects all the others, and each of those reflections contains reflections of every jewel in return. In principle, the entire cosmos is present in every node.

This image wasn’t meant as a poetic flourish. It was a way of describing a world where identity comes from interdependence, where the part and the whole are inseparable. When you change one node of the net, the entire configuration shifts.

Interestingly, a few developments at the frontier of physics echo this kind of structure.

Entanglement and Shared Description

Quantum entanglement links particles so deeply that their properties arise from a single underlying description. Measure one particle and the outcome instantly constrains the other, even across astronomical distances. It’s not that one sends a signal to the other. Both belong to the same quantum state. They behave like two “faces” of one system. Of course, to say we understand entanglement or even quantum mechanics in general would be a stretch!

This is a form of relational identity, where the meaning of each part depends on how it participates in the whole quantum configuration.

The Holographic Principle

Research on black holes led to a surprising idea: the information that defines a region of space is encoded on its boundary. This is the holographic principle, and it gives physical support to the intuition that the whole is present in every slice.

Even if the specifics differ, the structure is familiar: the local and the global are tightly linked, each shaping the other.

Networks Beneath Spacetime

A growing line of research suggests that spacetime geometry may emerge from a network of quantum correlations. In these models, the distance between two points reflects how strongly they are entangled. The more connected they are, the “closer” they appear in the emergent geometry.

This turns the usual picture on its head. Space isn’t a container in which objects sit. Space is a pattern generated by relationships.

A Deepening Conversation

Indra’s net offers a way to think about systems where the whole is distributed through every part, and where identity arises from connection rather than isolation. Modern physics doesn’t adopt this image per se, but it does keep uncovering structures where correlations, information, and relational patterns play foundational roles.

As our theories push further toward unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, this relational thinking becomes more central. Whether through entanglement networks, holographic dualities, or emergent spacetime proposals, physics is edging toward a view in which the universe is an intricate web of mutual definition.

Indra’s net turns our focus to the architecture of connection. Many of the most interesting developments in physics suggest that this architecture may be more fundamental than we once imagined.