Fazang’s “rafter dialogue” offers a unique context for considering Huayen philosophy and interpenetration from the perspective of remix theory, illustrating how remix principles allow for a clearer understanding of the way parts function in their wholes. It also demonstrates how insight gathered from Huayen philosophy can be useful in expanding the understanding of culture and creation within the context of remix theory itself.
How can we conceive wholeness? Fazang’s interrogator asks.
Well, think of a building.
But isn’t that just the sum of various conditioning parts—things like rafters, shingles, windows, beams, and so on?
Well, yes. But it also is those conditioning parts. The building is the rafter. And the building is also those other things.
The building is the rafter? How so?
Because without the rafter, the building wouldn’t exist. The rafter is part of the building, but at the same time—and because of this—it is the building. It is cause for the building. As are those other things.
So begins one of the most influential philosophers of the East Asian Huayen school of Buddhism’s synecdochical foray into “wholeness.” Paraphrased, of course.
Fazang (643–712 CE), the school’s third patriarch, is known for his focus on the interpenetration of all phenomena—an extension of the doctrine of paṭiccasamuppāda, or “dependent origination”—and his so-called “rafter dialogue” found in the Treatise on the Five Teachings famously illustrates this theory of mutual dependence through a six-part metaphorical explanation of the relationship between a part (a rafter) and a whole (the building).
This conversation between Fazang and an imagined interlocutor famously offers critical insight into a rather complex doctrine, but it also offers a unique context for considering Huayen philosophy and interpenetration from the perspective of remix theory. Doing so illustrates how applying remix principles allows for a clearer understanding of the way parts function in their wholes, but it also demonstrates how insight gathered from Huayen philosophy can be useful in expanding the understanding of culture and creation within the context of remix theory itself.
Throughout the remaining conversation, Fazang addresses particularity (the parts also need to be distinct from the whole), identity (the whole is the unique result of its conditions), difference (the parts are identical as conditions but are also different from each other), integration (the whole is dependent on its conditions), and disintegration (the parts still maintain their own character amid their implication in a whole) to fully establish the features of their relationship.
It’s a seemingly simple yet heavy discussion that attempts to demonstrate one of the most foundational concepts in Huayen philosophy. The Jewel Net of Indra is a popular illustration as well: a magnificent net holding an infinite number of beautiful, glistening jewels, which, upon inspection, reflect all other jewels in their facets in an infinite process of mutual reflection. In Entry Into the Inconceivable (1983), Thomas Cleary refers to the entirety of the cosmos from the perspective of Huayen as “one single nexus of conditions in which everything simultaneously depends on, and is depended on by, everything else.” Fazang’s building can just as easily be understood as a stand-in for the entire universe as well.
A building, of course, is just Fazang’s metaphor of choice. We might attempt to illustrate the same thing, for instance, with a popular song—between its parts, or conditions, and the whole song itself—as an alternative example. Or with a film, a story, a car, a computer program—any number of examples could suffice. But Fazang’s metaphorical framework also captures the way creative production both conditions future productions and is itself conditioned by previous productions—and is made possible by both parts of that process—similar to the framing within the field of remix studies.
“Remix” is most often associated with the re-mixing of music, a practice that emerged during the mid-twentieth century among Jamaican dub artists and has perpetuated in many genres of music today. But during the latter part of the twentieth century, media theorists began to metaphorically extend the concept outside of those contexts to think about creative practices in general and how they necessarily rely and build upon what precede them. The theoretical foundation of remix studies is predicated on that metaphorical extension with a particular emphasis on the principles that underlie all creative processes: selectivity, recyclability, and recombinatoriality. Remix is thus both verb and noun: to remix is to repurpose selectively sampled source material into something else, and a remix is the resulting product of that recombinatory process (a bit more on all this here and, more generally, here).
While that alternative example of a song might now sound a bit more apt, remix theory doesn’t confine itself to that context from which its metaphorical value emerged. Already existent material is always sampled in the creation of something else—whether it’s the wood to produce a rafter or the teachings of a charismatic leader to produce a new school of thought. And the principles underlying remix theory can help highlight the relative conditional features that comprise every creative production.
Cultural traditions—even differing schools of Buddhist thought—can be similarly analyzed, as remix theory allows for the critical consideration of what constitutes any given phenomenon. A particular Buddhist tradition, for example, wouldn’t be that particular construct (whole) instead of something else without the teachings, practices, or texts (parts) that define it as such, and those parts are only meaningful and able to make sense in the context of the whole they are comprising. Fazang’s building becomes an exemplar in this regard too—as a construct built (remixed) from sampled material by a builder (remix artist).
Remix theorists typically focus on composition—how material is necessarily sampled in the creation of other forms, disrupting taken-for-granted notions of originality by discerning the fact that nothing is created in a cultural vacuum or ex nihilo. But they usually focus on the continuum of relationality in ongoing processes rather than the concurrent retroactive fabric of causal interactions Fazang highlights in his building. Those ongoing outputs are necessarily conditioned by what precede them, but they also condition the data that come together to make them whole. Causality is simply not unidirectional, and Huayen philosophy points to that retroactive continuum in a way that pushes remix theorists to further consider those levels of interdependency (one of the main features of the Remix+/- model I develop in my book). At the same time, remix principles uniquely highlight the relational qualities of phenomena over essential qualities since they explicitly point to the contextual particularities and function of whatever is being sampled in whatever has been created. Parts have no universal value or condition; such qualities are determined based on how they are used in specific contexts—a long piece of wood as a rafter in one context and perhaps as a bench in another. There’s an opportunity here, in other words, to uniquely reconsider both Huayen philosophy in terms of remix principles and remix theory in terms of the all-encompassing mutual dependence that is central to Huayen philosophy.
Remix theory asserts that a whole work (the creative production/output) cannot exist without the parts that comprise it (the sampled material/data). But sampled material also depends on resultant outputs. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be sampled material; it would just be data that isn’t conditioning anything other than its own relational parts. As Fazang describes it, the building’s existence is what allows for the rafter’s; without a building to complete, a rafter is not a rafter. Put another way, parts as parts can’t exist without their implication in a composite whole. They would otherwise be terminal wholes: resultant forms—comprised of parts—that are themselves not serving as parts for other wholes. And that’s simply not how creation works—not from the perspective of remix theory, and not in terms of the Huayen worldview. Absolutely nothing in the world is self-existing, without cause, self-sufficient without reliance on any other thing, or completely independent and indivisible.
Huayen philosophy is predicated on the fact that everything exists in relation to everything else: wholes are comprised of and conditioned by parts, and those wholes are themselves parts that condition other wholes in an endless and interrelated—or glisteningly interfaceted—web of connectivity. And while a whole is only a whole because of its parts, and parts are only parts in their relation to each other and to the whole that they form, Fazang indicates, parts are also relationally distinct from the whole itself. Otherwise, they couldn’t be conditions for the whole, which would mean that whole couldn’t exist. Phenomena might be identical in their joint conditioning of something, but they can’t be exactly identical to each other in this regard.
In the context of Fazang’s example, remix theory can also help illustrate that the nuances of all components and conditions are present in every composite form as well. That might sound fairly obvious at first: of course the features of the parts that make up the whole are present in that whole. That imbued rafterness is present within those rafters. But when we more closely analyze such features, we start to better see how they are also dynamically implicated in varying contextual relationships. The wood that was used to make the rafter is imbued with woodness, the trees cut down from the forest to supply the wood are imbued with treeness, and the building that is part of the town is characterized by its buildingness. But the quality being discerned in the rafter in the context of the building is not its treeness. It is its rafterness, and yet it also still contains treeness, though it is less defined by it here as it might be elsewhere.
Thinking about the framing in the rafter dialogue via remix principles can allow for a clearer consideration of how parts function in the wholes of which they are a part and how those roles change based on the context of particular wholes. It also helps illustrate the relational quality of phenomena—such as rafterness or treeness—as opposed to some sort of unchanging and delimiting essential quality, which is one of the broader points in Huayen philosophy Fazang’s dialogue is addressing. Seemingly defining qualities change, remix theory maintains, based on the context of parts’ contribution to certain wholes: they might have one functional/conditional quality in a certain formation but a different functional/conditional quality in another. And that’s the point: such defining qualities are always relational, not essential. They are defined by how they relate to other parts and wholes in very particular contexts. Huayen emphasizes complete dependence among phenomena—a total level of interpenetration—in order for them to exist, which is why all phenomena are considered identical by Fazang in their characteristic “emptiness.” To exist interdependently is to have a relational existence connected to all else, and with no inherent essence or nature, phenomena are “empty” and identical to each other in that emptiness and in their ability to comprise something concertedly.
But what happens when we shift the conceptualization of the building from structure to asset—as a piece of real estate with monetary value, with the rafter conceived as material investment rather than foundational support? The building is both of these things—and others—at the same time, simultaneously. It’s simply a matter of framing—of emphasizing and deemphasizing certain functional attributes over others and selecting a particular conception over another possibility. One of the main goals stressed in Huayen philosophy is to dissolve strict conceptional distinctions and untangle conventional understandings in order to see the faceted layers through which such conceptions and conventions interrelate and depend on each other—in a very similar and critical way as remix theory. The building isn’t either structure or asset; it’s both and more. Remix principles help us recognize what parts signify in different configurations and the intertextual layers of meaning present in a specific form versus another. They also help illustrate that within Huayen’s interdependent web there exist many aspects to the same jewel that inform its existence—just as structure and asset both inform and depend on the other’s existence—and push us to remain critically aware of those components, how they’re functioning, and how they too are informed by and further condition other phenomena.
We can easily get lost in the complexity of the theory underlying this perspective—both in terms of remix theory and the Huayen worldview. But one of Fazang’s main points is that this combinatory web of parts as parts, parts as wholes, and wholes as parts is a rather obvious presentation and conception of reality if we observe, analyze, and consider it. It’s as simple as understanding the characteristics of a building and its parts and how that particular relationship is not so much a distinct and separate construct but rather a specific moment in a creative, omnidirectional, recombinatorial, glistening continuum.
“Spiderweb Droplets” by Sue Corbisez, 2017 / CC BY 2.0.