The “Gandavyūha of the Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra” mainly describes how Sudhanakumara encountered everyone of his knowledgeable friends during his tour of learning and the dharma ways he thus learned from such friends; and how, in the course of practicing the dharma ways, his bodhi mind (bodhicitta) was also gradually perfected.
For structural framework, this dissertation has chapters entitled "Introduction", "The structure and perspective of the Gandavyūha ", "The time and space of the Gandavyūha ","The imagery and characters of the Gandavyūha”, all of which contain subsections covering various subjects, with the final chapter entitled “Conclusion” bringing an overall organized close to the whole dissertation.
In the chapter “Introduction”, past researches by other people and the objective and motivation of author's research are mentioned; also explained is how the sorted-out and useful aspects of such past researches were utilized in the present dissertation. “The structure and perspective of the Gandavyūha " deals separately with two major elements of "structure" and "perspective". The emphasis is on the "structural nature of verbs" and "the practice of the bodhi mind (bodhicitta)" which, it is hoped, might bring a completely fresh research perspective to the Gandavyūha based on the bodhicitta metaphor by Maitreya. "The time and space of the Gandavyūha " focuses on the discussions of "time consciousness" and "space theory". The time aspect in the Gandavyūha is very often entwined with “natural imagery” and harbors “Zen Buddhism insight.” “The imagery and characters of the Gandavyūha " first explores the origin of the word “imagery” and do so on both the Buddhist and literary levels. The dissertation ends with the imagery of the characters corresponding to the 52 the levels in the Bodhisattva way.