I completed the rough draft of Indra’s Net seven years after the Gulf War. President Clinton had lifted economic sanctions against Vietnam, starting a long process to normalize trade and diplomatic relations. At the time, Vietnam remained America’s enigmatic foreign military venture. Despite the collapse of Soviet Russia and its Eastern European sphere of influence, despite the spooling up of global marketing and business compacts between the United States and Communist China, closure on the Vietnam War eluded the American people…
As a student at the University of Oregon in the late ’70s, I learned the value of a huge research library with a government documents section. Stacks of details on America’s Cold War foreign policies later served as threads for Indra’s Net. Supplementing my major in Sociology with equivalent minors in Psychology and Political Science, I plunged headlong into a range of writings that included British empiricist/philosopher John Locke. Apparent was Locke’s profound influence upon Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and other Founding Fathers.
A clearer sense for America’s Twentieth Century emerged. The corporate society and a postwar descent into McCarthyism provided the ideological stage for the Vietnam War. Largely subverted were Paine’s Age of Reason and Jefferson’s vision of individualism, civil liberty and a pluralistic democracy. Following WWII, America stood unscathed in its industrial capacity, ascending as a world power with unparalleled military supremacy. That history became the impetus for writing my novel.
Like most Americans, graduating college led to family needs and responsibilities, years of earning a livelihood. Having honed my writing skills at the University of Oregon, I found my way into magazine journalism and technical writing, placing the “Vietnam novel” project on a back burner. In the early 1990s, having authored several successful non-fiction books and more than 2,000 magazine features, I continued research on the history and cultures of Southeast Asia. Studying Buddhist philosophy and psychology led to Vipassana meditation practice, and by the mid-1990s, autodidactic research included Vietnamese history, Zen/Chan and Taoist teachings plus a daily meditation practice.
The central theme of Indra’s Net is people, not corporate or political agendas. The Vietnam War, known today as the American War by the Vietnamese, unfolded within the histories of two peoples. These nations had common ground, a brief alliance toward the end of the Second World War that could well have continued. Instead, relations between the United States and Viet Nam deteriorated over the next decade and eventually led to the Vietnam—or American—War.
Although the novel Indra’s Net plays against a background of politics, corporate agendas, military interests and nationalism, the real players are people—and people mean relationships. The term “Indra’s net” originates in an Eighth Century Buddhist cosmological precept, the description of a Universe that includes sentient beings.
Symbolically, the vortices of Indra’s net each hold a faceted jewel that reflects all other jewels in the infinite net. In modern physics, our closest analogy would be a hologram, although this has more to do with images than essences. In Indra’s net, we see the interconnectedness of all things material, sentient beings and essences. (See this Oxford dictionary discussion of “Fa-Tsang’s image of Indra’s net, which spreads across the universe, with a perfect jewel in each of its links: each jewel reflects every other jewel in the whole net”…http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Hua-yen_Buddhism.aspx#1O101-Huayen.)
Similarly, the storyline of Indra’s Net unfolds against a landscape of historical events. The relationship between an American family and its Vietnamese counterpart become inextricably connected by history’s flow. A human play of circumstances, conditions of struggle, courage, family, loss and, ultimately, reconciliation, binds their lives.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam’s best known Zen monk and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, speaks of “inter-being,” affirmed through meditation practice and the letting go of attachment. In much that way, I went about writing Indra’s Net. I invite readers to experience the jeweled net from the vantage of co-arising interdependence…Enjoy the novel!
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Indra’s Net
While Indra’s Net speaks to WWII and the Vietnam experience, it also speaks to the larger issue of war. War is once again the central theme of American foreign policy, and my blog welcomes earnest viewpoints and founded facts that illuminate the impact of contemporary wars and ways nations can ameliorate political and cultural differences—and defeat terrorism—short of wide-scale military conflict…Take in the novel. It’s up for discussion.—Moses Ludel
“…this ambitious novel spreads its net across the marches of history, reeling in gold nuggets of intriguing fictional action…One of the best things about this novel is the author’s firm grasp of history, especially as experienced from the viewpoint character Dinh…the comprehensive novel reads like a history book without the boring bits…An engaging, satisfying, and richly lengthy read.”—****Holly Chase Williams, ForeWord CLARION Reviews.
Featured at the New York and Los Angeles BookExpo, Beijing and Frankfurt Book Fairs…Available through all major book outlets and independent bookstores in soft cover edition and Amazon Kindle book.
