The net of Indra

IN every age, painters have approximated the look and feel of their pictorial spaces and painted surfaces to the paradigm through which experience has been most vividly dramatised in that age. To offer only a few examples, the shamans of antiquity treated their painted walls as though they were skies, since flight through the open sky was their chosen metaphor of freedom. European painters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods rendered their paintings as though they were theatre performances, in the interests of dramatising epic narrative for a viewership used to the conventions of the festive or allegorical pageant. Similarly, the more intimate painters of the Dutch and Flemish genres preferred the painting-as-chamber, for it allowed them to explore the dramas of the private life of passion and inquiry that was flowering in republican northern Europe, away from the clerical dogmatism and stifling court etiquette of the royal and papal south.

By contrast, the Romantics preferred the panoramic vista to the bourgeois interior, finding in the wild sweep of landscape a natural stage where the desire for liberty from social norms and political impositions could express itself unrestrained. And when the Cubists inaugurated the process of breaking down the effects of light and the structure of perceived objects, expressing the critical and revolutionary attitude of their generation, their paintings took on the character of a prism, each broken image the startling cumulus of many planes.

In keeping with this history of dialogue between the pictorial space and the dominant experiential paradigm, a small but significant number of painters in India today appear to have embraced the devices, both in terms of content and form, made possible by the Internet. Artists like Baiju Parthan and Jitish Kallat have given the painted surface a fresh lease of life by adopting an imagery related to questions raised by neurology, cybernetics and quantum mechanics. These questions deal with the nature of the human self, and the way in which it negotiates between the noosphere and the technosphere, the realm of the mind and the realm of the machine.

Their surfaces approximate that of the film screen or the PC monitor; they are inspired by the devices of scanning, morphing, the music video and, in Parthan's case, the interactive Web-based artwork-as-game. Absorbed in the magic of the shimmering electronic surface that plays with depth and emergence, they format their images as though they were elements subject to hypertext access and split-screen editing. In their hands, the canvas, a fictive space of an older kind, has begun to re-model itself on the virtual reality of the mouse-pad generation. Such art-works simultaneously rejoice in the new possibilities of expression and draw our attention to the perils they hold.

The Internet is a celebration of the collapse of spatial and temporal borders. At the same time, just as the imperial highways of the Romans, the Incas, the Mughals and the British transformed forever the lives of the people whose lands they passed through, the information highway has radically altered the habits, perceptions and values of its users: once inside its quicksilver domain, we experience a crossing-over of time-lines, periods, cultures and identities.

While the Net has stretched the boundaries of our imagination and filled our daily speech with scintillating new turns of phrase, then, it is also changing the textures of our thoughts, acts and art forms. As our forays into cyberspace come to acquire the same degree of importance with which we invest our flesh-and-blood lives, many of us run the risk of gradually supplanting real with virtual experience. And as virtual gratification takes over from actual gratification, more and more of us, it appears, will experience the world primarily as a net of electronic impulses: a net that is cast across millions of individuals, gathering them, at least in theory, together into a global community.

The Internet is only the latest in a long tradition of metaphors enshrining the interrelatedness of all beings, the possibility of a global community. Earlier in this genealogy, there occurs one of the most spectacular expressions of a global network that draws human, non-human and divine creatures together: the image of the net of Indra, the world conceived of as a web in which every sentient being is a jewel-like node or knot. We find this compelling image in the Mahayana scripture known as the Buddhavatamsaka Sutra, or the Sutra of the Garland of Buddhas. Called the Avatamsaka Sutra for short, this Mahayana scripture is extant only in Tibetan and Chinese translations today; the Sanskrit original has been lost. Taking for its centrepiece the principle of mutually unobstructed interpenetration, the Sutra teaches that all sentient beings are to be valued and cherished equally, without regard to difference.

The moral of Indra's net is that you cannot damage one strand of the web that is the universe, without damaging the others or setting off a cascade effect of destruction. By the same token, however, the compassionate and the constructive interventions that you make can also produce a ripple effect of beneficial action. The trouble with the Internet, on the other hand, is that, fascinating and useful as the system is, the very freedom it provides ensures that its users can blur or sidestep ethical issues. In this kingdom of coded signs, people can hide themselves behind assumed identities, spam and flame one another across phalanxes of mailboxes, hack into archives and enclaves they ought not to enter, unleash dangerous viruses into the circuitry of cyber-discourse.

The hate sites and porn sites that are the Net's most profitable locations attest

to the shadowy punk-Gothic side of the operation, to the psychoses and neuroses that flourish in the unpoliced back- alleys, sewer systems and palisades around the information highway.

The Net may generate a reassuring sense of community, but this is deceptive: more actively, it promotes an atomisation of society and a withdrawal into a protected individual space, such that human encounter becomes a game or a masked ball or a venture into enemy territory. If Indra's net is a celestial metaphor of perfect communication, the Internet is a more infernal model, one that often reflects the demonic and perverse side of human interaction. The Internet is, in one sense, the quintessential expression of an increasingly automated and technocratic society that desires to escape from itself, and into a terrain of fantasy; Indra's net, on the other hand, is a fantasy embodying the belief that there is no turning away from engagement with the real.

The image of Indra's net is often cited by the distinguished Vietnamese Zen master and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, who uses it to correct people who view Buddhism as a religion of retreat that urges its practitioners to escape from society. Emphasising the importance of dynamic interrelatedness, Thich Nhat Hanh points out that the individual is made up of non- individual elements.

Pursuing this logic, which reminds us that our actions are often programmed by texts hard-wired into our psyche, and that our interests are usually chain-linked to the interests of many other individuals, the master asks: How do you expect to leave everything behind when you enter a meditation centre? The suffering that you carry in your heart, that is society itself. You bring that with you, you bring society with you. You bring all of us with you. When you meditate, it is not just for yourself, you do it for the whole society. You seek solutions to your problems not only for yourself, but for all of us. We would do well to internalise this wisdom as we set off on our explorations of cyberspace.

RANJIT HOSKOTE

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