The Buddhism we have in the modern western world today is largely the kind of Buddhism acceptable to those with a modernist outlook. Contemporary Western discussions of Buddhism tend to emphasize those aspects of the tradition that sit most comfortably with secular modernity: philosophy, ethics, compassion, psychology, and especially secularised practices such as mindfulness. Buddhism is frequently presented as a rational and experiential tradition concerned less with faith or spirituality than with investigating the mind and cultivating ethical conduct.

This representation has deep historical roots. From the nineteenth century onward, partially to contrast Buddhism with missionizing and colonial expressions of Christianity, Buddhist reformers in Asia and Western translators increasingly portrayed Buddhism as empirical, philosophical, non-dogmatic, and unusually compatible with modern science (Sharf 1995; McMahan 2008).

These portrayals are not necessarily mistaken. Philosophy, ethical cultivation, contemplative discipline, and sophisticated analyses of mind are genuinely important features of Buddhist traditions. The problem is that this picture is selective. It leaves comparatively little room for another persistent dimension of Buddhist religious life: visionary experience.

Scholarship on Buddhist modernism has increasingly exposed this imbalance. Robert Sharf (1995) demonstrated how modern accounts of Buddhism privileged private meditative experience while marginalising ritual and traditional religious worlds, while David McMahan (2008) traced the wider processes through which Buddhism was reconstructed in dialogue with modernity. Eric Greene (2016, 2021), in particular, has shown how deeply visionary practices and experiences were embedded within historical Buddhist contemplative cultures.

Buddhism has certainly been a philosophical, ethical and contemplative tradition, but it has also been a visionary religion from its earliest beginnings. This does not mean that visionary experience has been equally important to every Buddhist school or practitioner. Rather, it has been a recurring, influential, energizing, radicalizing, and sometimes tradition-forming dimension of Buddhism across its long history.

What is a Buddhist visionary experience?

A Buddhist visionary experience should not be understood simply as “seeing” something that is not ordinarily visible. The term is better used in a broader sense to describe an extraordinary mode of experience in which something beyond normal perception is encountered directly or revealed. Visionary experience is not imagined or fabricated. Such experiences may seem to provide access to beings, realities, meanings, or forms of knowledge beyond ordinary sensory or conceptual awareness. They may be visual or auditory, but they can also be cognitive or noetic, affective, somatic, multisensory, or experienced simply as an overwhelming felt presence without any identifiable image or voice.

Buddhist traditions contain a correspondingly wide range of visionary phenomena. These include visionary encounters with Buddhas, bodhisattvas, teachers, devas, and other beings; experiences of felt presence; revelatory or prophetic dreams; revelations through which new teachings or practices are received; and forms of pure perception in which ordinary reality itself appears transformed, luminous, or sacred. Other experiences function prophetically, diagnostically, or confirmatively, providing guidance, indicating spiritual progress, or validating teachings and religious authority. These categories frequently overlap: a dream may contain an encounter, an encounter may communicate a revelation, and a revelation may confirm a practitioner’s role or realisation.

This broader definition prevents Buddhist visionary culture from being reduced to a catalogue of spectacular apparitions. Visionary experience concerns ways of seeing, hearing, knowing, feeling, and encountering. Buddhist traditions nevertheless insist on discernment (a process by which such experiences are assessed in terms of their usefulness to practice and benefit to practitioners and other beings). Extraordinary experiences are not automatically interpreted or understood as signs of awakening, and practitioners are repeatedly cautioned against becoming fascinated by, attached to, or overly confident in them.

Visionary from the beginning: The Buddha’s awakening and the Mahayana cosmos

The visionary history of Buddhism starts with the Buddha himself. Traditional accounts of Siddhartha Gautama’s awakening beneath the Bodhi tree describe a sequence of extraordinary experiences unfolding through the night. During the first watch, he recalled innumerable previous lives; during the second, he perceived the deaths and rebirths of beings according to their karma; and during the third, he attained liberating knowledge concerning suffering, its causes, and the path to freedom (Gethin 1998; Strong 2001; Analayo 2017). The important point is not whether modern readers interpret these accounts literally, symbolically, psychologically, or mythically. Within Buddhist tradition, awakening is not presented simply as the conclusion of philosophical reasoning. It involves forms of perception and knowledge unavailable through ordinary consciousness.

The wider early Buddhist world is equally far from secular and rational. The Buddha and his disciples encounter devas, Mara, nagas, and other non-human beings, while the higher knowledges they access through practice, the abhijnas, include capacities such as clairvoyance, recollection of former lives, knowledge of other minds, and perception of the karmic destinies of beings. Early Buddhist texts certainly caution practitioners against becoming fascinated by extraordinary powers, but they do not deny the possibility of extraordinary perception.

Mahayana Buddhism expands this visionary universe dramatically. The Pratyutpannasamadhi Sutra offers one of the clearest examples. This sutra advises practitioners to cultivate samadhi specifically in order to encounter Buddhas of the ten directions, see them directly, hear their teachings, and converse with them face to face (Harrison and McRae 1998; Greene 2016). Vision here becomes a deliberate contemplative possibility rather than an accidental miracle.

Pure Land traditions similarly centre on Amitabha Buddha and the realm of Sukhavati, with followers engaging in recitation, visualisation, and contemplation that may culminate in visions during meditation or at the time of death. The Avatamsaka Sutra, meanwhile, presents an immense visionary cosmos of interpenetrating Buddha-fields and transformed modes of perception.

These later Mahayana visionary traditions did not introduce something alien into an originally rational religion, as some secular Buddhist scholars have suggested. They elaborated possibilities already deeply embedded in Buddhist scripture from the time of the Buddha himself.

A visionary religion across two millennia

Across the more than two millennia that followed the Buddha, visionary experience repeatedly became a vehicle through which Buddhism developed, adapted, and transmitted new forms of religious knowledge. In Indian Buddhism, Nagarjuna came to be associated with the retrieval of the Prajnaparamita teachings from the realm of the nagas, while later tantric traditions developed extensive cultures of visionary encounter, revelation, empowerment, and transmission. Visionary experience was therefore not only a private spiritual event. It could become a means through which innovative teachings entered Buddhist practice and history.

In medieval Chinese Buddhism, visualisation developed into a sophisticated contemplative technology. As Greene (2016, 2021) has shown, practitioners were not necessarily understood to be merely “imagining” Buddhas. Disciplined visualisation could culminate in experiences interpreted as genuine encounters with sacred beings and realms. Pure Land traditions likewise preserved accounts of visions of Amitabha, revelatory dreams, and deathbed encounters that functioned as sources of assurance, religious knowledge, and communal validation (Greene 2016, 2021).

These dynamics became especially elaborate in Tibetan Buddhism. Tantric deity practice and guru yoga cultivated transformed modes of perception, while revelatory dreams, terma or treasure revelation, mind treasures, pure visions, and pure perception created enduring structures through which visionary experience could generate religious authority and new teachings. Tibetan treasure revealers such as Jigme Lingpa (1730–98), Sera Khandro (1892–1940), and Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–87) demonstrate how historically consequential such experiences could become. Their visions did more than provide private inspiration: they generated texts, contemplative practices, and in some cases founded entire lineages.

Nor was visionary experience confined to Vajrayana. The modern Thai forest master Ajahn Mun (1870–1949).described encounters with devas and other non-human beings during meditation, demonstrating its continuing presence within Theravada contemplative culture. Contemporary meditators likewise report lights, presences, visions, extraordinary dreams, and altered forms of perception, even within modern secular environments.

To recover Buddhism’s visionary history is not to deny the power of its philosophy, ethics, or sophisticated view of the mind. It is to recover a dimension of Buddhism that modern secular representations have disproportionately filtered out. From the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree to Pure Land devotees, Chinese meditators, Indian siddhas, Tibetan treasure revealers and contemporary practitioners, Buddhists have repeatedly understood the path as capable of transforming not only what a person thinks or how a person behaves, but what a person can see, hear, feel, encounter and know.

References

Bhikkhu Analayo. 2017. A Meditator’s Life of the Buddha: Based on the Early Discourses. Cambridge: Windhorse Publications.

Gethin, Rupert. 1998. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greene, Eric M. 2016. “Visions and Visualizations: In Fifth-Century Chinese Buddhism and Nineteenth-Century Experimental Psychology.” History of Religions 55 (3): 289–328.

——. 2021. Chan Before Chan: Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Harrison, Paul and John McRae, trans. 1998. The Pratyutpanna Samādhi Sutra and the Śūraṅgama Samādhi Sutra. Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research.

McMahan, David L. 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sharf, Robert H. 1995. “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.” Numen 42 (3): 228–283.

Strong, John S. 2001. The Buddha: A Short Biography. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

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