Rippling through temple halls and scroll paintings alike, the Avatamsaka Sutra’s vision of boundless interconnection has left an unmistakable mark on East Asian Buddhist aesthetics. In China’s Tang dynasty grottoes—like those at Dunhuang—the Sutra’s cosmic panoramas unfold across cave walls, every Buddha and bodhisattva woven together as if in a dragon-scale mosaic. Those multicolored, tiered mandalas take shape as visual hymns to interpenetration, each deity reflecting and reflecting back, just like Indra’s jeweled net.

By the Song and Yuan eras, court painters turned Huayan imagery into hanging scrolls brimming with tiny, nested worlds. The “Ten Vows of Samantabhadra,” for instance, often cascade down silk in repetitive, echoing scenes—reminders that every act resonates everywhere. Korea’s Goryeo artists were equally captivated, producing gilt-bronze shrines whose filigreed ornament resembles the Sutra’s infinite patterns.

Architecture, too, caught the Huayan wave. Several Chinese halls built for Huayan study featured concentric colonnades—pillars ringed like ripples in a pond—symbolizing ever-expanding realms of reality. Japan’s early Kegon temples (the Japanese name for Huayan) adopted circular layouts or multiple alcoves, each housing its own Buddha image, as though every chamber were a portal into another facet of existence. Mount Kōya’s Kongōbu-ji, with its layered prayer halls, still whispers the Sutra’s message: form and emptiness dancing together.

Nowadays, contemporary art biennales in Hangzhou and Seoul occasionally showcase digital installations inspired by the Sutra’s “one in all, all in one” creed. Virtual-reality experiences let visitors step into floating worlds, echoing that age-old teaching with 21st-century tech. Even modern meditation gardens borrow the Sutra’s interlaced design: stones, plants, and water features arranged so that each element mirrors the whole.

Through murals, sculpture, temple layouts, and even VR, the Avatamsaka Sutra continues to inspire artists and architects to imagine beauty without boundaries—where every part sparkles with the essence of the entire cosmos.