One Time, One Meeting

Bonnie Booman

On Saturday, August 31, in a memorial service for the late Bonnie Booman (1954-2019), the Reverend Laurie DeMott invoked the Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net to characterize Bonnie’s life and work. The metaphor was as timely as it was apt. Not only did it commemorate the life of a gentle teacher, whose patience, care, and imaginative insight inspired her students and exerted a beneficent influence on her community. In its wider implications, this ancient metaphor offered a potent antidote to the divisive spirit of our times, being at once an emblem of interconnectedness, interdependence, and the selfless nature of all conditioned things.

The first known reference to Indra’s Net appears in the Vedic literature, specifically the Athvara Veda (c.1000 B.C.E.). In the Buddhist tradition, the metaphor is closely associated with the Avatamsaka (“Flower Garland”) Sutra, where, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, “it is used to illustrate the infinite variety of interactions and intersections of all things.” According to the mythological narrative in which the metaphor appears, the Vedic deity Indra, King of the Gods, created a cosmic net that extends indefinitely in all directions. At each juncture of the net, there is a clear, many-faceted jewel, which reflects all of the other jewels. Because the net is infinite, this relationship is repeated over and over throughout the cosmos. Everything is connected.

In her Invitation to Gather in Remembrance, the Reverend DeMott related the figure of Indra’s Net to the life of Bonnie Booman, who, she noted, had “lived that metaphor.” A week before Bonnie died, DeMott invited her to describe her life and to reflect on what had been most important to her. She replied with a single word: connections. As an art teacher with twenty-two years of service at Alfred-Almond Central School, she forged meaningful connections with her students, nurturing their self-assurance and helping them to develop their native abilities. And in her personal life, she gave primacy to the web of relationships that included her friends, her family, her students, and the wider community. “Only connect,” E.M. Forster famously advised, in the epigraph to his novel Howards End. Throughout her adult life, in her professional, social, and family relationships, Bonnie endeavored to realize that humane imperative.

Indra’s Net is in part metaphor for such connections, but at a broader level, it is also an emblem of the interdependence of all phenomena. Stephen Mitchell has described Indra’s Net as a “profound and subtle metaphor for the nature of reality.” And, as Francis Cook observes in Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, the metaphor conjures a universe in which “each individual is at once the cause for the whole and is caused by the whole, and what is called existence is a vast body made up of an infinity of individuals all sustaining each other and defining each other.” In the language of Zen, this principle of interdependence is known as “dependent origination,” and it is summarized in the sentence, “This is, because that is.” Nothing, this principle holds, arises from nothing. What our individualistic Western culture conventionally calls the self and views as a solid, fixed, and separate entity is in reality a manifestation of ever-changing causes and conditions. Everything depends on everything else.

Beyond the realities of interconnectedness and interdependence, Indra’s Net is also a metaphor for the selfless nature of all conditioned things, be they plants or animals, rivers or human beings. In Mahayana Buddhist teachings, this quality is known as “emptiness,” a common translation of the Sanskrit word sunyata. One of the most misunderstood concepts in Buddhist thought, “emptiness” does not refer to a cosmic void, nor does it deny the existence of the self. Rather, it views the so-called self as made up of non-self elements. In the case of a tree, those elements include sunlight, soil, and water, without which the tree could not exist. With respect to a human self, they include all of our relationships, without which we would have no identity. What the self is “empty of” is an intrinsic, static, and separate existence. What it consists of is its dynamic relationships with everything that is not itself, including its ancestors, family, society, and natural environment.

No one understood this reality more clearly than Bonnie Booman, who devoted her energies to nurturing the web of relationships in which she lived. “If we could look into the jewel that was Bonnie,” DeMott remarked in her eulogy, “we would see the reflections of all your faces, because she believed that it is you who made her who she was.” In our contemporary, self-aggrandizing culture, such a belief is no longer widely held, nor does it govern our national life, but its very rarity makes it all the more valuable. Embodied vividly in the figure of Indra’s Net, it defined the life of Bonnie Booman, and it also comports with the way things actually are.

The Reverend Laurie DeMott is Minister of the Union University Church in Alfred, New York and Interfaith Advisor at Alfred University.

“[I]t is used to illustrate . . .”: Thich Nhat Hanh, Cultivating the Mind of Love (Parallax, 1996), 81.

Stephen Mitchell has described: Stephen Mitchell, ed., The Enlightened Mind (Harper, 1991), 41.

And, as Francis Cook observes: Francis H. Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 3.