Huayan thought receives the Madhyamaka insight that all dharmas are empty of inherent, independent self-nature, yet it unfolds this insight in a distinctive, more explicitly “cosmic” way. Both perspectives affirm that there is no ultimately existing substance or essence behind phenomena, and both rely on the logic that dependent arising and emptiness are two ways of speaking about the same middle way. Where Madhyamaka is primarily concerned with guarding against reification by stressing emptiness as sheer absence of svabhāva, Huayan turns to what this absence makes possible. Emptiness is treated as “principle” (li), inseparable from the phenomenal world, rather than as a separate, hidden reality behind it. This shared foundation allows Huayan to remain faithful to Nāgārjuna’s insight while giving it a different emphasis and expression.

Madhyamaka, especially in its more dialectical forms, tends to highlight the negative side of emptiness: it is the denial of any intrinsic nature and is often articulated through apophatic, refutational reasoning. Its two-truths framework keeps ultimate emptiness and conventional phenomena carefully distinguished, precisely to prevent subtle forms of grasping. Huayan, while not rejecting this, shifts attention toward the positive implications of emptiness for understanding the totality of the cosmos. Because things are empty, they are completely open and relational; this very lack of fixed essence is what allows every phenomenon to interpenetrate every other. Emptiness thus becomes the condition for a universe in which nothing stands alone and nothing obstructs anything else.

This vision is expressed in Huayan’s teaching of the dharmadhātu and the famous image of Indra’s Net, where each jewel reflects all the others without obstruction. Emptiness, understood as principle, and form, understood as phenomena, are said to interpenetrate without hindrance, so that each particular dharma can be seen as a complete expression of the entire dharma-realm. The fourfold dharmadhātu—phenomena, principle, the non-obstruction of principle and phenomena, and the non-obstruction of phenomena with one another—articulates this insight in a systematic way. Where Madhyamaka often stops at demonstrating that things do not possess inherent existence, Huayan elaborates how this very emptiness manifests as a seamless web of mutual containment. The result is a more cataphatic, richly descriptive account of reality that remains grounded in the same basic insight: because all things are empty, all things are profoundly and unobstructedly interdependent.