The image begins in the Atharva Veda 8.8.6, Indra's net as a war machine, arrows shooting out like the vast net of the sky-god. The Avatamsaka Sutra and the Huayan school, 3rd to 7th centuries CE, repurposed it: an infinite net with a glittering jewel hung in each eye, every jewel reflecting all the others, infinitely reflecting, per Francis Cook's classic formulation. The doctrine it carries: pratityasamutpada, dependent origination, identity is interdependence; change one node and the entire configuration shifts. Kasulis's modern gloss: like DNA, every part contains the blueprint of the whole.
Modern commentators map it onto quantum entanglement, particles sharing one description across distance, and the holographic principle, a region's information encoded on its boundary, the whole present in every slice. The mappings are suggestive and loose: entanglement is correlation, not reflection, and the net's jewels are ontological, not physical. The net keeps being rediscovered because it is the simplest picture of a relational universe, and physics keeps making the universe more relational.
The claim: Indra's net is the one cosmology with no throne, no central jewel, no privileged reflection, which makes it the theological nightmare of every power structure in this archive, since a universe of mutual reflection cannot be governed from a single point, only disrupted node by node. Verdict: the Huayan masters drew exactly this implication, no self-nature anywhere, and the archive notes the political reading writes itself: pyramids fear nets. The spider question is the wrong question. There is no spider. That is the whole doctrine, and the whole threat.
If every jewel contains the whole net, what is the net made of, and where is the spider?