Hold the net up to anything and it fits. Here's 16 ways folks have read it, or somethin' that rhymes with it — each kept short, and each with the spot where the rhyme quits. Nobody's pickin' a winner.
Hindu reading
In Sanskrit, Indra's net — indrajāla — got to be the word for a conjurin' trick2. Read that way, the net is māyā: the world as a grand show put on by a god, dazzlin' and tangled, and easy to take for the whole story. The Atharva Veda calls the whole world Indra's net1.
Where the rhyme quits: The Veda's net traps an enemy; there's no jewel in it reflectin' anything. The mirrors come later.
Huayan Buddhism
This is the one the picture was built for. Every thing contains all the others and is contained in all of them, the way each jewel holds the whole net. The Huayan word is interpenetration: the one in the many, the many in the one45.
Where the rhyme quits: Huayan means it about every thing, not only the pretty ones. A mud puddle is a jewel too.
Early Buddhism
Long before the net, the Buddha had a four-line rule: when this is, that is; when this comes up, that comes up; when this ain't, that ain't; when this quits, that quits8. That's dependent origination — Pāli paṭicca-samuppāda, Thai ปฏิจจสมุปบาท (patitcha-samupbat). The net is that rule, drawn.
Where the rhyme quits: The old rule is mostly about how sufferin' gets started and stopped, one link at a time — a chain more than a net.
Madhyamaka
Look close at one jewel. Everything you see in it came from somewhere else. Take away the other jewels and what's left to see? The philosopher Nāgārjuna said anything that comes up dependent on other things is what's meant by empty9 — not nothin', but not standin' on its own either.
Where the rhyme quits: The jewel's still there, hangin' on its knot. Empty ain't the same as gone.
Thích Nhất Hạnh
The Vietnamese Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh held up a sheet of paper and said if you squint real hard, there's a cloud in it — no cloud, no rain; no rain, no tree; no tree, no paper. And the logger, and his breakfast. His word for it was interbeing10.
Where the rhyme quits: He's talkin' about causes, one after another, back through time. The jewels shine all at once.
Thai and Lanna
In Thailand, Indra is พระอินทร์ (Phra In), known in the Pāli books as Sakka11, king of the heaven on top of Mount Meru in the Thai cosmology called the Traiphum12. Chiang Mai's city pillar, เสาอินทขิล (Sao Inthakhin), is told as sent down by him, and the city honors it every year13. The shrine it stands in is on Mot Dang, with a map and the way there. More on the Lanna side at wichaa.
Where the rhyme quits: In Thai tellin's Phra In is a helper god who shows up when good folks need him. The jewel net is mostly a Chinese Buddhist picture; it isn't a Thai temple story.
Leibniz, 1714
A German fella who'd never heard of Huayan came up with near the same picture. Gottfried Leibniz said the world is made of tiny simple things he called monads, and each one is “a perpetual living mirror of the universe”14.
Where the rhyme quits: His monads have “no windows” — nothin' goes in or out. The jewels are all window.
Quakers, 1656
George Fox, who got the Quakers goin', wrote from a jail cell tellin' Friends to “walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one”15. A light in every person, and you answer it by the light in yours. Jewel to jewel.
Where the rhyme quits: Fox was talkin' about how to treat people, not how the world is built.
John Muir, 1911
Up in the Sierra, John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”16. That's ecology in a sentence: pull the wolves and the elk eat the willows, and the creek bank caves in.
Where the rhyme quits: A food web has a whole lot of knots with no string between 'em. The net ties every knot to every knot.
Holograms
Break a photo in half and you get half a photo. Break a hologram plate in half and each piece still shows the whole scene, a little fuzzier17. The physicist David Bohm built a whole picture of the universe out of that: the whole folded up in every part18.
Where the rhyme quits: The smaller the piece, the blurrier the whole. The jewels don't lose a thing.
Gravity
Newton's gravity is a net: every lump of stuff tugs on every other lump, all the way across the universe19. With two it's tidy. With three it goes wild — that's the three-body problem, and it's why nobody can write down where three stars will be.
Where the rhyme quits: The tug gets weaker with the square of the distance. The far jewels in the net shine as bright as the near ones.
Quantum
Two particles can be entangled: measure one here and the other one, clear over yonder, matches it in a way no hidden plan could fix ahead of time20. That's the trick quantum computers run on.
Where the rhyme quits: You can't send a message that way21. The match only shows up when you compare notes, by regular mail.
Black holes
Light that skims a black hole gets bent clean around it. You see the sky once, then again in a thinner ring, then again thinner, on down — each ring a whole new picture of everything around22. A black hole is a jewel in the net, near enough. Drawn out at Black Holes, Drawn.
Where the rhyme quits: Each ring's about 23 times thinner than the last, so you'd need a mighty good telescope past the second one.
Chaos
Pluck one knot and the whole net shivers. Put a ball bouncin' between round mirrors and a hair's difference in where it starts sends it somewhere else entirely, fast23. That's chaos, and round mirrors are about the best chaos-maker there is.
Where the rhyme quits: Chaos is about not bein' able to forecast. The net, in the story, is about everything showin' plain.
Networks
In the 1960s a fella named Milgram had folks pass a letter hand to hand across the country; the ones that made it took about six hops24. A few long links make the whole world small25. Try it yourself.
Where the rhyme quits: Most letters never made it at all. Folks forget that part.
Mathematics
Put some round mirrors in a ring and look at each one in all the others. You get circles in circles in circles, crowdin' up into lace. Three mathematicians wrote a whole book on it and named it for the net: Indra's Pearls26. That's the next chapter. It's in the same family as the odd, pretty math that turns up where nobody expected.
Where the rhyme quits: It's the one readin' here you can draw exactly. Every picture on this site is that math.
The net only says one thing: nothin' here stands by itself. That's true enough of enough things that every field that notices it grabs the picture. The readings don't all agree — Leibniz's mirrors have no windows, Huayan's are nothin' but window — and that's fine. It's a net. There's room.