It turns out that the Universe is arranged in much the way Indra’s Net was described in early Hindu texts written in Sanskrit about 3,000 years ago, and later adopted as a metaphor for the universe in early Buddhism. The breakthrough came in a study of a filament from the Max Planck Institute, published in January 2025 in Nature Astronomy.
Credit: Alejandro Benitez-Llambay/Universität Mailand-Bicocca/MPA (high res version)
Francis H. Cook describes Indra’s net thus:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering “like” stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.
Philosopher Alan Watts described it similarly:
Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
