I have been posting truckloads of nonsense here recently. So I suppose it's time for me to be more serious.
Quite recently I've been doing reading about Buddhism. And thus I came across the Dependent Origination.
To simply put, Dependent Origination means that every event is caused by multiple causes and conditions. It is not "cause and effect" to say since what it is trying to reflect IMO(not the Buddhist's) is how chaotic and indeterminate reality actually is.
From this we get the sense that things are empty of inherent existence. This is to say that there's no entity that is unchanging and unaffected by causes and phenomenon. Proceeding from this, we get the Buddhist doctrine of the 12 links to explain suffering and the doctrine of the No Self.
Of course what I'm more interested in is how the Hua Yen School interprets this calling it instead the "interpenetration of all phenomena". Unlike how the Indians view this, the Hua Yen School's perspective on the Dependent Origination is not pessimistic. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Buddhism is fatalistic like Calvinism. It's just pessimist, having a rather bleak view of the human condition and reality itself seeing it as "empty" though it doesn't mean that what things external to us are not real.
To understand how the Hua Yen School views the Dependent Origination, we must understand how they view reality. To the Hua Yen School, reality consists of 4 Dimensions which are,
a)Existence(Shih)
b)Emptiness(Li)
c)Non interference of Shih and Li
d)Non interference of all entities in Shih
All of these are considered to be "one" and can be expressed through the analogy of the Statue of the Golden Lion where,
Gold=Li
Shape of the Lion=Shih
The Shape of the Lion is the result of conditioning by the craftsman, through which we get the character of the lion. The gold itself here have no nature of its own since it is just the color of the statue.
The Dependent Origination then is the shape of the lion, the craftsman represents the interdependent causes which arises all the phenomena which would be Dependently Originated from these causes.
From here if we look at the shape of the lion, there's no "gold" since what we are perceiving is the form which the statue take that is of a lion. This means that there is phenomena/existence but there is no emptiness.
We can also look at the gold but we would not perceive the lion. So there is no phenomena/existence, only emptiness.
Given both are true then the Li and Shih overlap each other in a form of synergy. This is what (c) means.
(d) refers to to how each and every entity that exists causes each other and the totality of them placed together which is the interpenetration of all phenomenon.
So I suppose this is the Hua Yen view of Dependent Origination put out simplistically. It makes sense to me and I'm quite tempted to adopt this position. But I worry that it might be heterodox. So hence my question.
Also, do any of the Church Fathers hold to this view of reality or something similar?