Treatise on the Golden Lion

A very short essay, traditionally said to have been composed by Fazang, the great systematiser of Huayan Buddhism, to explain its teaching to Empress Wu Zetian by pointing to a golden lion statue in the palace. The gold stands for principle (li), emptiness, and the lion's shape for phenomena (shi), which arise through causes and conditions. In ten brief sections Fazang shows that the lion has no nature of its own apart from the gold, while the gold has no shape apart from the lion; that every part of the lion, each eye, ear and hair, contains the whole lion and every other part; and that the parts are at once distinct and wholly interfused. He also maps the lion onto the stages of Buddhist teaching and onto the six characteristics of whole and part. The point is the Huayan vision of the unobstructed interpenetration of all things.

It is the most concentrated statement of Huayan's metaphysics of interdependence, and one of the shortest classics of Chinese philosophy.