Cleary writes, in the introduction to his translation of the Gandavyuha, “Entry into the Realm of Reality,” the final book of the Avatamsaka or Flower Garland Sutra:

According to the Flower Ornament teaching, however, the mutual inherence of past, present, and future does not represent unmitigated determinism, because the past, present, and future are all infinite. What is finite is the experience of being-time through the temporal capacity of a given range of consciousness; and insofar as that capacity may be altered, contracted, or expanded, it might be that many of the limitations regarded as real by an society or culture are in fact illusory, and the real potential of humanity is so much greater than imagined as to be virtually infinite, even if that infinity can never embrace the infinity of infinities.

Free will vs. determinism is a still unsolved puzzle; though we may be closer than ever to solving it. The Flower Garland Sutra may actually embody a poetically or imaginatively conceived solution — which imaginative, intuitive, poetic solution might be the only way to finally understand how the appearance or feeling of freedom can coexist with seemingly deterministic brain functioning. Maybe the feeling of freedom stands in same relation to deterministic brain chemistry as the appearance of light as waves stands to the appearance of light as particles — complementary views of the same reality. Daniel Dennett has written extensively about the free will question and describes some interesting paradoxes in his attempts to understand and analyze free will, freedom and how or if they can exist in a material universe.

‘The Flower Garland Sutra contains many, many passages that reveal visions of infinite worlds, beings, life, space, light, and time — all of which, according to Cleary, in his introduction to the “Entry into the Realm of Reality,” can be understood as material or occasions for practicing meditative visualization.

An example of this [visualization] practice is made explicit in a short scripture of the Flower Ornament corpus, called “Section on Cultivation of Love from the Flower Ornament Scripture.” Part of the visualization involves imagining every particle of one’s own body as a buddha-land, replete with such adornments as are described at great length throughout the scripture; then one visualizes all the beings in the universe entering into those buddha-lands within oneself and consciously evokes thoughts of love and wishes of well-being for them all. Another visualization practice, as evidenced in Chinese records, focuses on the lights emanated by buddhas in various scenes of the scripture.

D. T. Susuki wrote that he considered the Flower Garland Sutra — the Avatamsaka Sutra — to be the most cosmic, grand vision of reality in any scripture ever written or recorded. The massive, three-volume sutra is not a quick read — I was at it for years.

In Thomas Cleary’s forward to his translation of the final volume of his 3 volume edition of the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Gandavyuha or “Entry into the Realm of Reality” volume, he writes:

The book [Gandavyuha] begins with a symbolic description of manifestations of enlightened awareness, explaining that those who are within a fixed system have not the slightest inkling of the scope of consciousness that lies beyond the bounds of their perceptions as conditioned by their training and development. It suggests that all views that are conditioned by cultural and personal history are by definition limiting, and there is a potential awareness that cuts through the boundaries imposed by conventional description based on accumulated mental habit. According to the scripture, it is the perennial task of certain people, by virtue of their own development, to assist others in overcoming arbitrary restrictions of consciousness so as to awaken to the full potential of mind.

That aim or effect alone would be enough of a reason to study the Avatamsaka Sutra. But there is so much more, so many more reasons; the cosmic, sensual, sense-based imagery is breathtaking — if synapses can be overloaded by image and thought, this scripture will do just that — sometimes your mind can only take in a page or two at a time . Description can””t do it justice. Look for quotes — forthcoming.