Vision and Visualization - Eric Greeen

Eric M.
Greene VISIONS AND

VISUALIZATIONS:
IN FIFTH-CENTURY
CHINESE BUDDHISM
AND NINETEENTH-
CENTURY
EXPERIMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY
Over the past several decades scholars have come to realize just how radically
the Western understanding of Buddhism changed in the second half of the
nineteenth century. With the rise of Orientalist scholarship, the increasing
availability of primary texts in translation, and the efforts of Asian Buddhist
modernizers to counter the criticisms of Western missionaries, in both popular
and scholarly imagination Buddhism was transformed from a benighted idol-
atry into a humanistic, practical, rational, and perhaps even scientific path of
wisdom, ethics, and meditation, one that has since proven increasingly ap-
pealing to Europeans and Americans.1 Recent critically minded Western
scholars of Buddhism generally agree that, among its other consequences, this
shift in understanding obscured as much as, and probably more than, it
This article has been tremendously improved by the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of
numerous people. I wish to thank in particular Robert Sharf, Alexander von Rospatt, Jacob Dalton,
Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Robert Ashmore, David Schmit, and Marek Sullivan. Earlier versions of
this article were presented at Yale University and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Vari-
ous comments from a number of people at these events have also helped me to clarify my thinking
on the issues here addressed. Finally, two anonymous reviewers for History of Religions also pro-
vided many helpful pointers. As goes without saying, all remaining errors or infelicities are
entirely my own.
1
For a recent survey of these changes seen through the lens of shifting perceptions of the figure
of the Buddha, see Donald S. Lopez Jr., From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
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290 Visions and Visualizations
revealed. Though their newfound knowledge of classical Asian languages

allowed Western scholars to understand, for the first time, key Buddhist doc-
trines and ideas, this came at the expense of ignoring most of what has histori-
cally counted as Buddhism. Much recent scholarship has thus been directed
toward reevaluating precisely those activitiesrelic worship, the cult of images,
spellcraft, mortuary practice, and so forththat our nineteenth-century aca-
demic forebears had dismissed.2
But the biases of what we may loosely call the Orientalist approach did
not merely direct scholarly attention away from Buddhism on the ground.
They also established and entrenched a particular language for talking about
those Buddhist ideas and practices that did come to be valued and appreciated
in the West, and this language was not necessarily neutral. Few examples of
this are clearer than enlightenment, a term that came to be used among
scholars of Buddhism only gradually, and one that tacitly equates the goals of
Buddhist practice with the core values and ideals of modern Western iden-
tity.3 In other words the early favorable interpretations of Buddhism are prob-
lematic on two fronts. First, because they downplayed the importance of
many living Buddhist practices; but second, because the language they devel-
oped to talk about the rest of Buddhism often encoded potentially question-
able assumptions about what such things are all about.
Most scholars are likely aware that a word such as enlightenment easily
distorts our understanding of premodern Buddhism. But there are other simi-
lar areas where the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
interpretations has remained unnoticed, enshrined within vocabulary whose
use has become second nature. One example of this is the word visualiza-
tion, a term now used regularly to describe certain forms of not only Bud-
dhist, but also, at the least, Hindu, Daoist, Christian, and Jewish meditation
2
On Buddhist relic-worship, see David Germano and Kevin Trainor, eds., Embodying the
Dharma: Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).
On image worship in Buddhism and other Asian religions, see Robert H. Sharf and Elizabeth Hor-
ton Sharf, eds., Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Phyllis E. Granoff and Koichi Shinohara, eds., Images in Asian Religions:
Texts and Contexts, Asian Religions and Society series (Vancouver: University of British Colum-
bia Press, 2004). On Buddhist spellcraft, see Paul Copp, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Rit-
ual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Recent works on Buddhist mortuary practices and death rituals include Bryan J. Cuevas and Jac-
queline I. Stone, eds., The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Rita Langer, Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contem-
porary Sri Lankan Practice and its Origins (London: Routledge, 2007).
3
On Buddhist enlightenment, see Richard S. Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, Reli-
gion, Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 134. Similar moves were made by medieval Chi-
nese translators when they rendered bodhi as dao , the Way. See Robert H. Sharf, The Scrip-
ture in Forty-Two Sections, in Religions of China in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 363.

History of Religions 291
practices.4 Yet the pervasive use of this word among scholars and practi-
tioners of Buddhism in particular is not accidental, nor does it simply reflect
the discovery of a common, clearly identifiable form of contemplative prac-
tice shared across different religions and cultures. As with enlightenment,
there is a history to our use of the word visualization, a history that is worth
uncovering if only because it can help us better understand the profound
changes in the Western understanding of Buddhist meditation that took place
around the turn of the twentieth century.
Indeed, the meaning of visualization that scholars commonly invoke
when describing Buddhist meditation5 practicesthe controlled generation
of perfectly lifelike, eidetic mental visual imagerywas originally devel-
oped in the context of late nineteenth-century experimental psychology, and
it was adopted as a translation or explanation of Buddhist practices only in the
1920s, having first been appropriated by Western occult groups such as the
Theosophical Society.6 The particular, polemical context in which the con-
cept of visualization was invented and then applied to Buddhist meditation
reveals much about the new interpretations of these practices coming into
vogue at that time. Exposing its genealogy will also help us understand more
4
For examples of Hindu practices discussed by scholars in terms of visualization, see the arti-
cles collected in Andre Padoux, ed., Limage divine: Culte et m editation dans lhindouisme (Paris:
Editions du CNRS, 1990). On some medieval Christian practices described in these terms, see Bar-
bara Newman, What Did It Mean to Say I Saw? The Clash between Theory and Practice in
Medieval Visionary Culture, Speculum 80, no. 1 (2005): 143, and for Judaism, see Elliot R.
Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). But apart from Buddhism, it is in reference to
Daoism that the word is used most often; see, e.g., Michael Puett, Becoming Laozi: Cultivating
and Visualizing Spirits in Early-Medieval China, Asia Major, 3rd ser., 23, no. 1 (2010): 22352;
Paul Kroll, Body Gods and Inner Vision: The Scripture of the Yellow Court, in The Religions of
China in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996),
14955; Kristofer Schipper, The Inner World of the Lao-Tzu Chung-Ching, in Time and Space
in Chinese Culture, ed. Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zurcher (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 11431.
5
Meditation itself is a term that deserves to be interrogated more fully, as this word does not
correspond to a single concept within Buddhism. Alan Sponberg, Meditation in Fa-hsiang Bud-
dhism, in Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press, 1986), 1521. In the context of Buddhism, meditation, or rather the
Latin meditatio, seems to have been first used by Jesuits missionaries in Japan in the mid-sixteenth
century in reference to Zen k oan practice. Urs App, The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery
of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Rorschach: University Media,
2012), 24.
6
Scholars do not yet seem to have settled on a single term to refer to nineteenth- and early twen-
tieth-century groups such as the Theosophical Society, Swedenborgianism, New Thought, and so
forth. The concept of Western Esotericism has gained favor among some scholars, while Cather-
ine Albanese proposes, at least in the American context, Metaphysical Religion. See Catherine
Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). In the
absence of an agreed-upon designation, and keeping in mind that it may carry inappropriate conno-
tations, I will fall back on the admittedly vague term occult, a word that was indeed frequently
used by members of the Theosophical Society (and others) to denote the general field of their
inquiries.

precisely the implications of the word visualization itself, and this will
allow us to see how in one specific case where it is now commonly used
fifth-century Chinese Buddhismthis term may imply something rather dif-
ferent than what our sources seem to be advocating.
To be sure, scholars have at times questioned the exact role of visualization
in the Buddhist traditions usually associated with it. In the case of Japanese
Shingon Buddhism, Robert Sharf thus argues that, contrary to typical schol-
arly accounts, visualization does not seem to properly capture either the
experiences or expectations of living practitioners, or the formal instructions
given within contemporary Shingon ritual manuals.7 However, even Sharf
concedes that classical Buddhist meditation texts do describe practices that
can be characterized as visualization, and his conclusions are based on direct-
ing attention away from the content of such prescriptive texts toward the man-
ner in which such texts are actually used within the Shingon tradition. My aim
here, though inspired by Sharfs questioning of the role of visualization within
Buddhism, will be somewhat differentnot so much to investigate whether
the experiences or states of meditation described in prescriptive Buddhist
texts are or were ever actually obtained, but rather to explore how such experi-
ences are represented as taking place ideally, and to question whether the lan-
guage of visualization accurately conveys this.
buddhist visualization
Modern scholars speak of visualization in reference to a number of Buddhist
practices, which we may heuristically group into three main areas. Usually
considered the most primitive and historically earliest are the kasia (total-
ity) meditations, best known from postcanonical Theravada sources.8 In
these practices the meditator begins with an external objectsuch as a patch
of earth or a candle flametoward which she must direct the mind until this
object can be seen even when the eyes are closed.9 The now visualized
7
Robert H. Sharf, Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism, in Living Images: Japa-
nese Buddhist Icons in Context, ed. Elizabeth Horton Sharf and Robert H. Sharf (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 15198.
8
Many scholars discuss the kasia practices in terms of visualization. See, e.g., Ninian
Smart, Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of Religious Discourse, Christian and Non-Christian
(London: Routledge & Paul, 1958), 96; F. Chenet, Bhavana et Creativite de la Conscience,
Numen 34, no. 1 (1987): 4950; Sharf, Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism, 154
55.
9
That the kasia meditations should begin with an external object is an explanation found only
in Pali commentaries and treatises. In Sanskrit sources, the corresponding ktsn ayatana medita-
tions are not, to my knowledge, ever described in this way. See, e.g., P. Pradhan, ed., Abhidharma-
kosabh ayam of Vasubandhu (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Center, 1975), 457.1316. The
kasia (or ktsn ayatana) meditations appear in the Pali Nik
ayas and Chinese translations of the

Sanskrit Agamas on only a few occasions, and never with any discussion of practical methods. See

object then serves as the basis for further meditation. Found in a broader range
of sources, this same procedure is also prescribed in the contemplation of
foulness (asubha-bh avana ), with the difference that the object of contempla-
tion is a decaying corpse or, in some instances, a painting or statue of such a
corpse.10
Scholars also often describe as visualization certain forms of the recol-
lection of the Buddha (buddh anusmti). In the earliest versions of this an-
cient Buddhist practice, one brings to mind the Buddha in terms of his abstract
qualities or epithetsthat he is, for example, the teacher of gods and men
or the fully enlightened oneand such commemoration is said to lead to a
variety of benefits.11 But in later texts, it is often recommended that one recol-
lect the Buddha in terms of his physical appearance, with the goal now being
to actually see the Buddha as if he were present.12 These forms of the practice
are the ones frequently discussed in terms of visualization. Their emergence
in Indian Buddhism has been linked by scholars to the increasing prominence
in the early centuries of the Common Era of seeing as the most profound
form of interaction with the Buddha and his teachings, a historical change that
Alex Wayman, Meditation in Theravada and Mahsasaka, Studia Missionalia 25 (1976): 39.
Alexander Wynne has even suggested that the kasia meditations were borrowed by Buddhists
from Brahmanical meditation, a hypothesis that while speculative would explain their lack of
prominence in early canonical Buddhist texts. See Alexander Wynne, The Origin of Buddhist
Meditation (New York: Routledge, 2007).
10
On paintings as a basis for the a
subha-bh avana , see Eric M. Greene, Death in a Cave: Med-
itation, Deathbed Ritual, and Skeletal Imagery at Tape Shotor, Artibus Asiae 73, no. 2 (2013):
26594. Unlike the kasia meditations (see previous note), non-Pali sources do clearly specify an
external object in the case of the corpse meditations. Still, here too the earliest texts are ambiguous.
The locus classicus for the practice is the Satipah ana-suttas: As though he were to see a corpse
thrown aside in a charnel ground, one, two or three days dead, bloated, livid, and oozing matter, a
monk compares his own body with it thus: This body too is of the same nature, it will be like that,
it is not exempt from that fate. Bhikkhu Naamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Dis-
courses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nik aya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom,
1995), 148, with slight modifications. As Bhikkhu Bodhi notes (ibid., 1192 n. 150), the wording
suggests that a real corpse is not necessarily required. The only potentially early canonical passage
I know that clearly describes the eventually standard procedure of finding a corpse, gazing at it,
and then going elsewhere to meditate upon it, occurs in the Chinese translation of Mad-
hyam agama; see Zhong ahan jing , T.26:1.646c18647a13; T here and hereafter refers
to Taish o shinsh
u daiz
okyo , ed. Takakusu Junjiro and Watanabe Kai-
gyoku (Tokyo: Taisho issaikyo kankokai, 192432); texts indicated by text number (T)
followed by volume, page, register, and line number(s).
11
Bhikkhu Naamoli, The Path of Purification: Visuddhimagga (Berkeley: Shambhala Publi-
cations, 1976), 209.
12
On visual buddh anusmti see Paul Harrison, Buddh anusmti in the Pratyutpanna-buddha-
samukh avasthita-samadhi-sutra, Journal of Indian Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1978): 3557, and
Commemoration and Identification in Buddh anusmti, in In the Mirror of Memory, ed. Janet
Gyatso (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 21539. For a recent discussion that
attempts to link these practices to the ritual site of Borobudur, see Julie Gifford, Buddhist Practice
and Visual Culture: The Visual Rhetoric of Borobudur (London: Routledge, 2011), 98108.

touches on questions of new literary conventions, the growth of image wor-

ship, and the rise of literacy, to name but a few relevant domains.13
Although scholars have traced Buddha-visualization practices to a few key
Indian texts, the best-known examples actually come from Chinese Bud-
dhism, particularly from the so-called Contemplation Scriptures (Guan jing
).14 Indeed, these texts, which were most likely composed in China, are
often referred to as the Visualization Sutras, a designation coined in the
1950s by art historian Alexander Soper based primarily on his analysis of their
most famous exemplar, the Scripture on the Contemplation of the Buddha of
Immeasurable Life (Guan wu liang shou fo jing ; hereafter,
Immeasurable Life Contemplation).15 This text prescribes a series of practices
leading to a vision of the Buddha Amitabha and his pure land, something
accomplished, Soper argued, by visualization, the systematic building-up
of visual images, each as complete and precise as possible, in a sequence from
the simple toward the complex.16 Sopers use of the word visualize to
describe the kind of meditation recommended by these texts has generally
been followed by subsequent scholars.17
13
Andy Rotman, Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 18990. This emphasis on the visual was not limited to Mahayana
Buddhism, and can be found in contemporaneous non-Mahayana literature as well. See Rupert
Gethin, Mythology as Meditation: From the Mahasudassana Sutta to the Sukhavativyuha Sutra,
Journal of the P ali Text Society 28 (2006): 63112. More generally, increasing Buddhist emphasis
on seeing was but one part of what Stephan Beyer has described as a wave of visionary theism
spreading throughout India at this time. See Stephan Beyer, Notes on the Vision Quest in Early
Mahayana, in Praj~ nap
aramita and Related Systems: Studies in Honor of Edward Conze, ed.
Lewis Lancaster (Berkeley: Group in Buddhist Studies, 1977), 32940. Thus contemporaneous
non-Buddhist Indian devotional and meditative texts similarly emphasize the visual and icono-
graphic elements of the deity. The Bh agavata-pur aa thus instructs one to recollect (the same
verb used for the recollection of the Buddha) the god Viu as follows: Recall (smaranti) him
as four-armed, and holding the lotus, the disk, the conch and the mace. His face is smiling, his wide
eyes are like lotuses, and his clothing is as yellow as the filaments of the kadamba flower. See
David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 101.
14
For a basic survey of these texts, see Julian F. Pas, Visions of Sukh
avat: Shan-taos Commen-
tary on the Kuan Wu-liang shou-fo ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995),
3545.
15
Though the titles of the texts appear to take guan as a verb (Scripture on the Contemplation
of . . . ), guan may have originally referred to the genre of the texts. Kasugai Shinya
Kanmury ojubutsukyo ni okeru shomondai , Bukky o bunka kenkyu
3 (1953): 3750. This is confirmed by the citation of the titles in ancient sources.
See, e.g., Gao seng zhuan, T.2059:50.343a5; Tiantai Zhizhe da shi bie zhuan, T.2050:50.191c9;
Guan wu liang shou fo jing shu, T.1753:37.246b17; Mo he zhi guan, T.1911:46.97b10; Guan
wu liang shou jing yi shu, T.1752:37.237a1819; Xu gao seng zhuan, T.2060:50.593c25.
16
Alexander Coburn Soper, Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China (Ascona: Arti-
bus Asiae, 1959), 144. Soper here presents visualize as a translation of the word guan , a ren-
dering followed by many later scholars in this and other contexts.
17
The Scripture on the Contemplation of the Buddha of Immeasurable Life is indeed often sim-
ply called the Visualization Sutra. See, e.g., Richard K. Payne, The Five Contemplative Gates
of Vasubandhus Rebirth Treatise as a Ritualized Visualization Practice, in The Pure Land Tradi-

The final and perhaps most common area where scholars of Buddhism dis-
cuss visualization is Tantric Buddhism, in both its South- and East-Asian
forms.18 Most commonly, visualization is said to be what takes place during
the complex rituals of worship and self-transformation known as s adhana,
realizations.19 As Elizabeth English explains it in the introduction to her
translation of one particular s adhana text: This most important meditative
tool [in performing a sadhana] is the technique of visualization meditation. . . .
Texts state that he should see ( pasyet, avalokayet, keta) the object of med-
itation very clearly (vispaataram) and unwaveringly; he should contem-
plate (vi-cintayet), imagine (vi-bh avayet), meditate upon (dhy ayat), or
be convinced of (adhimu~ ncet) it.20 It is interesting to observe, however,
that though English (the author) here lists a number of different verbs denoting
the mental activity required of the practitioner of a s adhana, her subsequent
translation renders all of these words simply as visualize.
This terminological inconsistency is, in fact, found wherever scholars dis-
cuss Buddhist visualization practice. Indeed, as Rupert Gethin has pointed
out, at least in the case of Indian Buddhism, scholars do not use visualize
as the translation of a single technical term. This word serves, rather, as an
interpretation of what a number of very general termssuch as the verb
bhavayati, perhaps the most universal Indic word for meditationmean
when they take objects with visual qualities.21 Thus, for example, texts use
the same word, smti, recollection, regardless of whether one recollects the
abstract qualities of the Buddha or his physical appearance. Similarly the Path
tion: History and Development, ed. James Foard, Michael Solomon, and Richard K. Payne
(Berkeley: Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series, 1996), 23366. Sopers observations about the con-
nections between these texts and Buddhist artwork has also inspired a steady stream of further
analysis, and many art historians have concluded that the statuary and paintings found in the fifth-
and sixth-century Buddhist cave temples of Central Asia and China must have served, at least in
part, as aids for these visualization practices. Stanley Kenji Abe, Art and Practice in a Fifth-Cen-
tury Chinese Buddhist Cave Temple, Ars Orientalis 20 (1990): 117; Ning Qiang, Visualization
Practice and the Function of the Western Paradise Images in Turfan and Dunhuang in the Sixth to
Seventh Centuries, Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 2 (2007): 13342.
18
Visualization is often said to be a defining element of Buddhist Tantra. John S. Strong, ed.,
The Experience of Buddhism, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, 2002), 193; Paul Copp,
Visualization and Contemplation, in Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia, ed.
Charles D. Orzech, Henrik H. Srensen, and Richard K. Payne (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 14145.
19
Luis O. Gomez, Visualizing the Deity, in Buddhism in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 31827; Ria Kloppenborg and Ronald Poel-
meyer, Visualizations in Buddhist Meditation, in Effigies Dei: Essays on the History of Reli-
gions, ed. Dirk Van Der Plas (New York: Brill, 1987), 8396. How so-called visualization was
incorporated into Tantric ritual has now been clarified by Koichi Shinoharas groundbreaking
study of early Chinese sources. Koichi Shinohara, Spells, Images, and Maalas: Tracing the Evo-
lution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
20
Elizabeth English, Vajrayogin: Her Visualizations, Rituals and Forms; A Study of the Cult
of Vajrayogin in India (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002), 29.
21
Gethin, Mythology as Meditation, 96.

of Purification (Visuddhimagga), the most important source where the kasia

meditations are described in detail, uses identical terms for the stages of medi-
tation and the kind of mental engagement required at each stage, regardless of
whether one begins with an external visual object such as a patch of earth, or
something abstract, such as the notion of compassion or love. And, as several
scholars have noted, these points hold in East Asian Buddhist sources as well,
where the verb guan , which Soper translated as visualize, in other con-
texts readily takes nonvisual objects.22
Indeed, it is interesting to observe that none of the above forms of Buddhist
meditation were described as visualization when first discussed by scholars
writing in English or other European languages at the end of the nineteenth
century.23 Of course, that there may be no single Buddhist word for it should
not necessarily discourage us from using the word visualization, any more
than the absence of a word for politics in premodern China prevents us from
discussing premodern Chinese politics. But it does serve to remind us of the
need to look closely at our understanding of the word visualization, and
indeed this word seems often to carry with it a specific set of connotations that
we would do well to investigate more closely. Mircea Eliade, for example,
invokes the concept of visualization in reference to Tantric s adhana rites with
what seems to be a rather precise understanding of what it entails:
The complete operation [of a s adhana] includes several stages, the first of which is to
visualize a divine image, to construct it mentally or, more precisely, to project it on
a sort of inner screen through an act of creative imagination. There is no question here
of the anarchy and inconsistency of what, on the level of profane experience, is called
imagination; no question of abandoning oneself to a pure spontaneity and passively
receiving the content of what, in the language of Western psychology, we should term
the individual or collective unconscious; it is a question of awakening ones inner
forces, yet at the same time maintaining perfect lucidity and self-control.24
For Eliade, then, visualization is quite different from ordinary imagination; as

an active process that expresses ones inner forces and self-control it is
sharply distinguished from chaotic, spontaneous, and perhaps above all, pas-
22
Sharf, Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism, 163, 183; Copp, Visualization
and Contemplation, 142. Sharf further notes that modern East Asian Buddhist dictionaries define
terms that Western scholars often translate as visualizesuch as guan or xiang with
meanings that suggest more inclusive renderings such as discern or contemplate.
23
The first English translation of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation, published by Takakusu
o in 1894, rendered guan as meditate on. See J. Takakusu, The Amitayur-
Junjir
utra, in Buddhist Mah
dhyana-s ayana Texts, ed. Max Muller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894). On early
Western scholarly discussions of the kasia meditations and Tantric s adhana, see nn. 72, 74, and
75.
24
Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Prin-
ceton University Press, 1969), 207; the French original (published in 1954) is indeed visualiser.

sive imagination. As we unpack the history of the Western concept of visu-

alization more fully, we will see that the distinction Eliade draws here was
indeed integral to the polemical context in which this word was first deployed,
one that initially had nothing to do with Buddhism at all. And as I will then try
to show in the case of fifth-century Chinese Buddhism, this sharp contrast
between active and passive is one of the connotations of visualization that
proves difficult to square with a careful reading of at least some of the Bud-
dhist material to which it has been applied.
toward a history of visualization

Websters Dictionary (3rd ed.) defines to visualize in two ways: 1) the act
or power of forming mentally visual images of objects not present to the
eye . . . 2) the act or process of putting into or interpreting in visual terms or in
visible form.25 For one accustomed to using visualization to describe con-
templative practices, the second of these two definitions may seem odd. Here,
to visualize is not an internal mental activity; it is the external interpreta-
tion through a visual medium of something originally lacking visible form.
A painting or poem, for example, might visualize, that is to say make visible,
certain ideas or sentiments.26
This, moreover, turns out to be the original meaning of the word, which in
any form dates only to the early nineteenth century (it seems to have been a
neologism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge).27 Around the middle of the nine-
teenth century, however, visualize began to be used in reference to specifi-
cally mental activity. Some of the first attested examples of this appear in the
writings of the physicist John Tyndall, who often used the word to describe
how a scientist should mentally picture subsensible phenomena. Thus in
25
Websters Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (London: Merriam,
1961), 2,558.
26
In contrast it is now more common to speak of visualization as the mental feat that allows
artists to successfully reproduce complex paintings. See, e.g., Anne Harrington and Arthur Zajonc,
eds., The Dalai Lama at MIT (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 99.
27
The first edition of Websters from 1846 thus gives only definition 2. Noah Webster, ed., A
Dictionary of the English Language (London: Merriam, 1846), 1,115. The word does not appear
in eighteenth-century dictionaries such as Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language,
3rd ed. (Dublin: W. G. Jones, 1768). The earliest use of the word cited by the Oxford English Dic-
tionary is from Coleridges Biographia Literaria (1817). The word is not borrowed from any other
European languages (see n. 35), and given Coleridges predilection for fanciful neologisms, it is
reasonable to infer that the word is his creation. Note that the editors of the Oxford English Dictio-
nary cite Coleridges example under their definition To form a mental vision, image, or picture
of, corresponding with definition 1 from Websters, not under their definition to render visible,
where they cite later examples pertaining to artwork and photography (http://www.oed.com/view
/Entry/224009, accessed on May 1, 2012). However, this seems wrong. Coleridges example of
visualized puns refers to a poem that describes the Dog-star using a description of an actual
dog. Visualized here means cast into a literary image that makes visible a nonvisual thing (the
dogness of the Dog-star).

1873, speaking on the nature of light, he writes: To realize this subsensible

world, if I may use the term, the mind must possess a certain pictorial power.
It has to visualize the invisible. It must be able to form definite images of the
things which that subsensible world contains. . . . This conception of physical
theory implies, as you perceive, the exercise of the imagination. Do not be
afraid of this word, which seems to render so many respectable people, both
in the ranks of science and out of them, uncomfortable.28 However, whereas
to visualize here indicates a mental activity, it does not yet mean mentally
reproducing actual visual perception. For Tyndall, visualization makes visi-
ble something that could never actually be seen, not something that one has
seen before, or something simply not presently available for viewing. Note
further that for Tyndall, visualization and imagination are not entirely
synonymous. Tyndall indeed seems to have thought that the word imagina-
tion would have, for his audience, a negative connotation, and he tries to dis-
tinguish visualization as a kind of imagination that we should not fear because
what it brings to mind are real things.
Though Tyndalls usage thus does represent an evolution in meaning,
making visualization a mental activity similar to imagination, an even more
radical change in meaning occurred soon thereafter. This new sense is ex-
pressed clearly in an American dictionary published between 1889 and 1906,
which defines to visualize as follows: to call up a mental image or picture
in visual terms with a distinctness approaching actual vision.29 Here we seem
to finally arrive somewhere near the concept of visualization that has been
invoked in the context of Buddhist meditation. This new meaning was, more-
over, not simply a natural evolution of the word, and late nineteenth-century
dictionaries invariably refer to Francis Galtons Inquiries into Human Faculty
and Its Development (1883) as the source of this usage.30
Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, developed his theories about what he
came to call visualization based on written correspondence with various
subjects whom he had asked to: think of some definite objectsuppose it is
your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morningand consider care-
28
John Tyndall, Lectures on Light (New York: D. Appleton, 1873), 34 (emphasis mine). Leav-
ing aside the incorrect analysis of Coleridges meaning (see above n. 27), the first example of the
meaning form a mental vision given by the Oxford English Dictionary is another citation from
Tyndalls writings (dated to 1863), in which he speaks of how one might visualize atoms.
29
William Dwight Whitney and others, eds., The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (New
York: Century Co., 18891906), 6,772.
30
Francis Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan,
1883). Galton had begun his research on visualization in 1879. See Francis Galton, Statistics of
Mental Imagery, Mind 5 (1880): 30118, and The Visions of Sane Persons, Popular Science
Monthly 19 (1881): 51931. For a chronology of Galtons work during these years, see Karl Pear-
son, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1924), 2:23348.

fully the picture that rises before your minds eye.31 Galton then inquired
about the visual qualities of this image, such as its illumination, definition,
and coloring. Galton was surprised by his results, and he found that whereas
men of science tended to protest that questions about the illumination of
mental images were meaningless,32 women and young boys often claimed to
experience mental imagery in full, vivid coloration. Galton accounted for
these differing responses by positing what he called the faculty of visualiz-
ing,33 the ability to recall previously experienced visual perception in a man-
ner that mimics the original perception itself. In the wake of Galtons studies,
the understanding that some people possess such abilities spread rapidly
through the scientific community and even the general public. Definitions of
visualization based on Galtons usage appear in English dictionaries as early
as 1883,34 and by the 1890s visualization had become a hot topic within the
nascent field of psychology (the word first spread to other European languages
such as French and German in this context).35 To this day Galton is remem-
bered as the first scientist to systematically study mental imagery, a topic of
ongoing debate among psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists.36
31
Galton, Statistics of Mental Imagery, 301.
32
A sample of the objections of these nameless men of science is worth citing: These ques-
tions presuppose assent to some sort of proposition regarding the minds eye and the images
which it sees . . . This points to some initial fallacy . . . It is only by a figure of speech that I can
describe my recollection of a scene as a mental image which I can see with my minds eye . . . I
do not see it . . . any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure
he is made to repeat (ibid., 302, ellipses in original).
33
For the sake of consistency, I here use the now-standard American spelling of this word.
34
John Ogilive, The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language (London: Blackie & Son,
1883), 573, with Galton as the source. A number of related neologisms also appear around this
time, such as visualist, defined as one whose memory retains visual images better than other
kinds; William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert, A Dictionary of American English (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 193844), 2,422, with citations from 1885 and 1902. We also find
visualizer, someone with a developed power of visualization. Whitney et al., The Century Dic-
tionary and Cyclopedia, 6,772.
35
See, e.g., William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: H. Holt, 1890),
2:5156, who presents an extended treatment of visualization based entirely on Galtons studies.
French dictionaries record the earliest use of the verb visualiser, explicitly taken from the
English, in an 1887 psychology textbook, and hence presumably borrowing from Galton. Paul
Imbs, ed., Tr esor de la langue francaise; dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe sie`cle, 16
vols. (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 197195), 16:1,209. German
contains a number of words corresponding to the pre-Galton, nontechnical meaning of visualize
(such as sich vorstellen), but in the context of both psychology and Buddhist meditation the normal
word is visualisieren, taken from the English.
36
As one might expect, what counts as evidence one way or the other within these debates is
itself a subject of dispute. For the pro-imagery position, see Stephen Michael Kosslyn, William L.
Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis, The Case for Mental Imagery (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006). For the contrary position, that it does not make sense to speak of images in the brain, see
Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Seeing and Visualizing: Its Not What You Think (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2003), whose approach is inspired by philosophers such as Daniel Dennet. See also Zenon W.
Pylyshyn, Mental Imagery: In Search of a Theory, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002):

I have no pretensions to wade into the disputes about whether or not mental
imagery in the sense posited by Galton actually exists or not. Relevant for my
purposes is simply that it is with Galton that we find the origins of a key com-
ponent of visualization implicitly invoked whenever mention is made of Bud-
dhist (or other) eidetic contemplation.37 It is thus worth our while to look
more closely at both Galtons understanding of visualization and, even more
importantly, the particular historical and intellectual context within which he
asked the questions he did. Equally important, as we will see, are the ways
that his notion of visualization as a scientifically verifiable mental faculty
would, in the span of less than a decade, be appropriated by those interested
in occult and psychical phenomena. It was through such channels that
visualization would eventually come to characterize Buddhist meditation
practices.
from galton to theosophy to buddhism

Galton writes that he had begun to ponder what we might think of as the photo-
graphic qualities of imagination in part because he was attempting to under-
stand visions,38 a subject of long-standing interest for nineteenth-century intel-
lectuals.39 One of Galtons first presentations of his research on visualization
was thus an 1881 lecture entitled The Visions of Sane Persons,40 where he
proposed that visualization could explain those visionsof ghosts, angels,
deceased relatives, or anything elsereported by people who otherwise lacked
pathological symptoms. Such visions were of particular interest in the context
of nineteenth-century debates because they challenged the usual understanding
of a link between hallucinations and mental impairment. So, too, for those open
to the possible reality of otherworldly phenomena (which Galton was not), the
reports of otherwise healthy individuals proved particularly compelling.
For Galton, the concept of visualization provided a solution to this prob-
lem. First and most important, it explained how someone might actually see
unreal things, and Galton suggested that visions and hallucinations were,
157238, which includes responses (on both sides of the issue) by prominent researches in the
field.
37
Eidetic imagery is usually defined as a mental visual image that precisely replicates
the image generated during perception. See, e.g., David Matsumoto, ed., Cambridge Dictionary
of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 177.
38
Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development, 83.
39
A full bibliography of nineteenth-century attempts to provide a naturalistic explanation for
visions would run several pages. Two of the more influential works include A. Brierre de Boismont,
Des hallucinations, ou histoire raisonn ee des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de lextase, du
magn etisme et du somnambulisme (Paris: Germer Bailliere, 1845); Wilhelm Griesinger, Mental
Pathology and Therapeutics (London: New Sydenham Society, 1862).
40
This lecture was then published as Galton, The Visions of Sane Persons.

in fact, simply well-developed visualizations.41 Naturalistic accounts of

visions had of course been proposed on and off for centuries,42 and Galtons
forerunners in the nineteenth century included Wilhelm Griesingers theory
of eccentric projection, the stimulation of the optic nerve under the influ-
ence of the imagination so as to exactly replicate visual perception.43 Despite
sharing ground with earlier thinkers, Galtons approach was novel in that he
did not simply explain how visions might occur but also postulated a non-
pathological origin for them, the faculty of visualizing. In other words, what
was problematic about vivid visions, Galton believed, was not their occur-
rence per se, but rather wrongly interpreting mere visualizations as evidence
for the existence of ghosts, spirits, and so forth.44
It is possible to understand what Galton was doing here as, at least in part,
distinguishing visualization from the more generic faculty of imagination,
which in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was generally divided
into two forms. The first of these was the more or less classical understanding
of imagination as the re-presentation of previously experienced (bodily) sen-
sory perceptions.45 During the eighteenth century this form of imagination had,
however, come to be seen in a negative light. It was routinely criticized by
Enlightenment thinkers as passive, as something that occurred without judg-
ment or will and which indeed tended to dominate and control the mind, push-
ing it dangerously toward belief in unreal things.46 But another form of imagi-
41
Interestingly, Galton was unconcerned by the reports of some of his respondents who had
both experienced visions and who could visualize well that vision is not a vivid visualization, but
altogether a different phenomenon (Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Develop-
ment, 164).
42
On some fourteenth-century attempts to explain visions in naturalistic terms, see Andrew
Fogleman, Finding a Middle Way: Late Medieval Naturalism and Visionary Experience, Visual
Resources 25, no. 12 (2009): 728.
43
Griesinger, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, 30.
44
Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development, 174. Here Galton echoes
Edward Tylors account of the origin of religion in spontaneous visions. Edward Tylor, Primitive
Culture (New York: Harper, 1958), 2:62.
45
On the Greco-Roman understanding of the imagination, see Gerard Watson, Phantasia in
Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press, 1988). That imagination is the re-presen-
tation of previous experienced bodily sensory impressions remained the standard understanding
through the end of the seventeenth century. Only after this point do we find the gradual appearance
of a split between a creative imagination that is the province of artists and a practical imagina-
tion that is employed by ordinary people. See John D. Lyons, Before Imagination (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005), xiiixiv and passim.
46
To take a useful example, the entry on the word Imagination in Diderots Encyclop edie,
written by Voltaire, thus distinguishes imagination as either active or passive, and the reproduction
of previous sensory experience is given as the basic feature of the latter. Voltaire spares little pains
in vilifying passive imagination, which he describes as something even animals can do, and which,
when unchecked in man, often leads to madness. Above all it is faulted as something that controls
us: cest un sens interieur qui agit avec empire; aussi rien nest-il plus commun que dentendre dire:
on nest pas le matre de son imagination. According to Volatire, passive imagination is entirely
independent from la reflexion. This kind of imagination is the source of countless illnesses and

nation was also acknowledged and, at least for some, held in esteem. Instead of
the mere passive recollection of previously seen or heard things, this form of
imagination was the active, willful, and creative combination of previously
experienced perceptions into new ideas.47 (It was this that Kant called Einbil-
dungskraft and what Romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often
influenced by Kant, called secondary or creative imagination.)48
As we consider how Galtons notion of visualization was positioned with
respect to prevailing understandings of the imaginative capacities of the mind,
it is interesting to note that even Romantic champions of the imagination
agreed with their critics that to merely reproduce previous sensory experience
was a quite ordinary power, one not requiring, and indeed perhaps even
incompatible with, any great feat of will or control. It is further noteworthy
that the ever-present dangers of this kind of imagination were often felt to be
correlated with its vivacity. We see this already in the writings of David
Hume, often one of the first thinkers discussed when charting the modern his-
tory of the imagination. For Hume, ideasthe faint residues of sensory
impressionsapproach the vivacity of sensation itself only in dreams, fever,
madness, or when under the grip of the passions.49 Humes understanding of
the connection between vivid imagination and mental impairment was gener-
ally followed by later philosophers writing on visions and apparitions,50 and,
delusions, and it enslaves common people by leading them to believe in things that do not exist.
Denis Diderot, Encyclop edie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des m
etiers par une
societe des gens de lettres, 28 vols. (New York: Readex Microprint Corp., 1969), 8:56062.
47
Voltaires article in the Encyclop edie (see previous note) also discusses this form of imagina-
tion, described as a gift of geniuses and artists. Unlike passive imagination, according to Voltaire
this active imagination is always united with judgment ( jugement). Concerning the increasing
criticism of imagination in late eighteenth-century France, see Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolution-
ary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 17501850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005), 2159.
48
James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981), 181, 34346.
49
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 9. Hume states
clearly that ideas and impressions differ only in vivacity: That idea of red, which we form in the
dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in sunshine, differ only in degree, not in nature
(ibid., 51). Imagination for Hume was the process of reproducing impressions as ideas in combi-
nation with passions. When ideas were created without any such interference, it was simply mem-
ory. For Hume imagination is thus always potentially dangerous, since it has a tendency to stir the
passions beyond ones control.
50
Saumel Hibbert thus concludes that apparitions are nothing more than ideas, or recollected
images of the mind, which have been rendered more vivid than actual impressions, but then also
notes that such apparitions are always connected with morbid affections, and are the product of
disease that is particularly common among the vulgar. Hibbert then argues that the increasing
vivacity of mental images necessarily goes hand with the impairment of judgment and reason: in
every undue excitement of our feelings (as, for instance, when ideas become more vivid than
actual impressions) the operations of the intellectual faculty of the mind sustain corresponding
modifications, by which the efforts of the judgment are rendered proportionally incorrect. Samuel
Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1825), vvi.

as discussed above, it is implicit in the approach of those nineteenth-century

scientists who offered explanations of visions but for whom the vivid experi-
ence of objects not actually present was by definition pathological.
Galtons visualization was thus conceptually novel in that it was posited
as a faculty, that is, a nonpathological capacity of the mind, one that for
some people at least could produce the kinds of vivid mental images, up to
and including those indistinguishable from visual perception itself, that had
previously been considered sure signs of mental derangement. There were no
doubt many reasons why Galtons claim that visualization was not inherently
pathological came to be accepted by the scientific and wider community. But
it surely helped that he presented it as an active faculty of mind that could at
least potentially be controlled, and Galton noted with interest those who with
practice managed to improve the vividness of their mental imagery.51 Indeed,
as some scholars have argued, in the basic Victorian understanding a lack of
personal agency was the chief characteristics of mental illness.52 Any claim
that visualization was not simply a disease of the brain thus necessarily
involved framing it as something other than the passive imagination derided
by Enlightenment thinkers since the early eighteenth century.
Galtons notion of visualization thus provided a naturalistic explanation
of visions that did not pathologize visionary experience itself. However, pre-
cisely because Galton framed visualization in such a way that it was poten-
tially compatible with the ideals of agency and control dear to a certain class
of Victorian society, it did not take long before this concept was taken up by
those seeking to provide socially acceptable and scientifically verifiable tech-
niques for accessing the very things whose existence Galton thought he was
disproving. Most important here was the Theosophical Society, whose influ-
ence on early popular Western understanding of Buddhism has been much
studied in recent years.53
Galtons visualization may have proven attractive to Theosophists be-
cause it was able to express, as words like imagination could not, the sense
of active, personal agency that Theosophist writers had been claiming differ-
entiated their practices from what at the time was usually called trance.
Trance, the English translation of extasis in the King James Bible, origi-
nally referred to moments in which Christian worshipers gained divine revela-
tion. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a number of
51
Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 2:241. Galton considered the abil-
ity to be permanently limited for some people.
52
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience
from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 123.
53
One of the best introductions to this subject remains Stephen R. Prothero, The White Bud-
dhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

groups, using techniques modeled on those popularized by Friedrich Anton

Mesmer (17341815), had begun to regularly provoke seemingly similar
states (as they came to be called). As Ann Taves has shown, attempts to
account for this now humanly induced condition in medical or scientific terms
(or, to show that it could not be so accounted for) drove much nineteenth-
century theorizing about the nature of religious experience, by scientists, reli-
gious groups, and everyone in between.54
Magnetic or trance states, as they came to be known, were induced in
willing subjects by trained handlers. While in trance the subject was generally
made obedient to the will of the handler, and upon waking had no memory of
what had transpired.55 Although initially trance was used for healing pur-
poses, the seeming ability of those in tranceclairvoyant somnambules as
they were often calledto transcend the normal bounds of sensory perception
soon aroused great interest in its own right. Most famously, beginning from
the 1850s these practices were adopted by the Spiritualists, who used trance
mediums (another new term that dates from this time) to communicate with
the spirits of the dead. Taken by some as scientific evidence for the existence
of the soul,56 for many followers of the emerging sciences of psychology and
neurology, as well as for mainstream Protestants, states of trance were patho-
logical and dangerous.57
54
On the spread of Mesmerism in nineteenth-century England and America, see Allison Win-
ter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998); and David Schmit, Re-visioning Antebellum American Psychology: The Dissemination
of Mesmerism, 18361854, History of Psychology 8 (2005): 40334.
55
In Mesmers system the aim was to eventually induce bodily convulsions, much on the
model of Catholic exorcisms. After the French government banned Mesmers healing methods in
1784, a number of new models were developed. Most notably Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chas-
tent, the Marquis of Puysegur, developed a means of inducing what he called magnetic somnam-
bulism. In this state, subjects experienced no convulsions, but remained calm and, above all,
bound to the will and instructions of the handler. They furthermore had no memory of the events
upon waking. It was this form of trance that spread most widely in the nineteenth century. See
Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008), 5153.
56
Thus in the words of one apologist: It is not the external eye that sees. It is the soul using
the eye as an instrument . . . prove once that sight can exist without the use of light, sensation, or
any physical organ of vision, and you prove an abnormal, supersensual, spiritual faculty;a
proof which puts an end to the theory of materialism. Epes Sargent, The Scientific Basis of Spiri-
tualism (Boston: Colby & Rich, 1881), 13334. Note how for Sargent even the mere experience
of seeing, independent of the reality of what is seen, proves the existence of the soul.
57
As Ann Taves argues: [The] central experiential claim [of the Spiritualists]that animal
magnetism opened a psychologically grounded and empirically verifiable doorway between the
human world and a world of the spiritsfaced challenges from a variety of directions during the
1870s and 1880s. Anglo-American neurologists, intent on establishing themselves as a recognized
subspeciality within the medical profession, attacked Spiritualism in a largely successful bid to
secure a secularized understanding of trance as a foundation for their own neurological science.
Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 207.

Criticism of trance centered on mediums lack of personal agency and their

enslavement to their handlers.58 The basic problematic of early Theosophy (as
well as certain other new religious movements in the late nineteenth century)
was to find ways of retaining the powers of trance mediums while overcom-
ing such perceived defects, thereby appealing to what Ann Taves terms the
respectable Protestant understanding of human agency.59 Some of the earli-
est writings of Henry Steel Olcott, cofounder of the Theosophical Society
along with Helena Blavatsky in the mid-1870s, are thus sustained criticisms of
the excessive passivity of Spiritualist mediums. These criticisms eventually
led to what one scholar has called the paradigm shift by which the Theosoph-
ical Society replaced passive and mostly female trance mediums with active
male adepts whose abilities were personally cultivated, not induced.60
Visualization thus seems to have offered a language for talking about
visionary experiences that indexed the assumed nonpathological nature of
such experiences and the attendant understanding that they were the results of
controlled, willful cultivation, not passive trance. By the early 1890s Theo-
sophistsat least those in Englandwere routinely claiming visualization
as the scientific basis for clairvoyance and other occult powers.61 It seems
58
See, e.g., George M. Beard, The Scientific Basis of Delusions: A New Theory of Trance and
Its Bearings on Human Testimony (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1877), 5.
59
Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 127. In the 1860s, the former trance medium Paschal Bev-
erly Randolph made similar efforts to reformulate mediumistic powers, and Randolphs criticisms
of trance and his development of what he called waking clairvoyance greatly influenced the later
Theosophist presentation of such ideas. John P. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nine-
teenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1997), 25366.
60
Stephen Prothero, From Spiritualism to Theosophy: Uplifting a Democratic Tradition,
Religion and American Culture 3, no. 2 (1993): 204. These arguments, as Prothero notes, incorpo-
rated broader cultural assumptions regarding the dangerous passivity of women and the willful activ-
ity of men. Taves observes further that such critiques were frequently authored by male mediums
criticizing their female counterparts, and the equation between control and manliness is often ex-
plicit. Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 219.
61
See, e.g., Annie Besant, A Word on Man, His Nature, and His Powers (London: Theosophi-
cal Publishing Society, 1893), 1112. Spirit writing, to take one concrete example, was said to be
the precipitation of astral matter in the form of ink, following the outline of the letters that the
adept visualized with perfect clarity in the correct location. A Primer of Theosophy (Chicago:
Rajpu Press, 1909), 3334. Some examples make it clear that, at least in the early 1890s, the con-
cept of visualization conveyed a technical, scientific-sounding meaning. Thus, for example, in
1892 Annie Besant wrote that all persons who visualize much are to some extent clairvoyant.
Annie Besant, Reincarnation, Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine 10 (1892): 148. The quotation
marks around the word here, which are present in the original passage, suggest that Besant
expected her readers to see visualize as a potentially unfamiliar technical term. Other examples
make this even clearer. Thus in an 1897 lecture: Some of you can visualize, as it is called techni-
cally . . . that is, by an effort of thought you can really see your friends face. Annie Besant,
Clairvoyance and Mental Healing, reprinted in The American Theosophist 15, no. 7 (1914):
556, emphasis mine.

quite likely, though this remains to be seen, that the initial adoption of this
term among Theosophists came by way of the famous London-based Society
for Psychical Research, whose members were using the concept of visualiza-
tion as early as 1884only a few years after Galton introduced his studies
in their attempts to offer scientific analyses of visions. In the studies of the
Society for Psychical research visualization referred to the internal projec-
tion of a mental image (usually of a ghost or other apparition) onto the retina
such that an authentic experience of seeing could take place in the absence of
an external object.62 Notably, for the Society for Psychical Research visuali-
zation referred primarily to cases where such seeing was prompted by an
actual spirit (presumed to communicate via telepathy), such that visualized
objects were still veridical.63
More research will be needed in order to determine precisely how the con-
cept of visualization was applied by Theosophists and others during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what is most significant for my
present purposes is that there appears to be a traceable line of connection
between late nineteenth-century occultism and the eventual use of the lan-
guage of visualization in reference to Buddhism.
Indeed, as early as 1898, long before it was ever used by scholars of Bud-
dhism (or, as far as I know, any other religion), visualization appears in
Theosophist publications describing meditation practices that some members
were then learning from Indian gurus.64 Meanwhile the earliest use of the
word visualization in reference to Buddhism seems to be the 1927 transla-
tion of the Tibetan Book of the Dead by W. Y. Evans-Wentz (18781965),65
who Donald Lopez has recently described as having a lifelong commitment
62
See Frederic Meyers et al., A Theory of Apparitions, Proceedings for the Society of Psy-
chical Research 2 (1884): 15786. See also Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Meyers, and Frank
Podomore, Phantasms of the Living, 2 vols. (London: Trubner, 1886), 1:256. On the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR), see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical
Research in England, 18501914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The SPR tried,
in a systematic way, to apply the language, theories, and experimental practices of modern material-
ist science to explain nonmaterial phenomena.
63
Thus it was by visualizing that a psychic could successfully read a playing card from the
back (Gurney et. al, Phantasms of the Living, 1:32). The SPR was famous for its public debunking
of Blavatsky, and it would not be too difficult to imagine (though more research here is needed)
that Theosophists appropriated the notion of visualization as part of a broader reaction to such criti-
cisms. It is perhaps significant that, as far as I have been able to determine, the words visualize
and visualization seem to have become prominent within Theosophist writings only after Bla-
vatskys death in 1891.
64
H. Seakav, Fragmentary Thoughts no. III, The Theosophist 19 (1898): 663.
65
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Or The After-Death Experiences on the
Bardo Plane, according to L ama Kazi Dawa-Samdups English Rendering (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1927; reprint, 2000, with foreword by Donald S. Lopez Jr.), 19, 22, 28, 32, 33, 98,
99, 122, etc.

to Theosophy,66 and whose four early books on Tibetan Buddhism he charac-

terizes as what happened when American Spiritualism went abroad.67
Within the Tibetan Book of the Dead, visualization appears primarily within
Evans-Wentzs own explanations and glosses of the meaning of the translated
Tibetan text.68 Nonetheless, Evans-Wentz clearly came to regard this word as
an accurate English equivalent of key technical vocabulary. Certainly this was
so by the time he finished his Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, published
in 1934, where visualization explains and translates numerous Tibetan med-
itative practices and where, moreover, Evans-Wentz suggests that visualiza-
tion practices are also found, in less developed forms, within other Buddhist
traditions.69
Evans-Wentzs use of the word visualization appears to have been without
precedent among earlier Western-language studies of Buddhism. Yet within his
own intellectual genealogy this word was likely the obvious choice when
attempting to describe a real visionary encounter. Indeed, long before his tra-
vels to the East and studies of Tibetan Buddhism, Evans-Wentz had already
discussed the concept of visualization in his doctoral dissertation from Oxford,
published in 1911 as The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Much of this book
is a chronicle of supposedly eyewitness accounts, both ancient and contempo-
rary, of Irish fairies (and he is clearly sympathetic to these accounts). But in
the final two chapters Evans-Wentz attempts various scientific explanations of
fairy encounters in light of the latest research in psychology. And though the
topic is discussed only in passing, at one crucial juncture he proposes that
visions of fairies might be explained as visualizations, a concept he intro-
duces with explicit reference to the writings of the Society for Psychical
Research and their studies of phantoms and apparitions, and which he
explains, as did those earlier writers, as a kind of internal projection of a men-
66
For an account of Evans-Wentzs early and continuing involvement with Theosophy, see pages
BD of Lopezs introduction (ibid.).
67
Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 2011), 11. Evans-Wentz did not read Tibetan, and these translation were
carried out by Kazi Dawa Samdup (18681922), an English teacher at the Maharajas Boys
School in Gangtok, Sikkhim, though Evans-Wentz must be seen as having supplied much of the
specific English vocabulary.
68
Thus, in his introduction, he cites the translation of the text itself which says that the dying
person must know that these apparitions are [the reflections of ] thine own thought-forms, but
then goes on to explain that this means that such visions are merely the consciousness-content
visualized. See Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Book of the Dead, 32. Visualization is also often overtly
inserted into the translation itself as an explanation of what is intended, rather than as a direct trans-
lation (ibid., 174, 176, 186).
69
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (London: Oxford University Press,
1934). See, in particular, 41. See also his Tibets Great Yogi, Milarepa (London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1928), 141.

tal image onto the nerves of the eye in such a manner that real seeing takes
place without a publicly available external object.70
changing perceptions of buddhist meditation

Having thus seen how the concept of visualization aligned with the Theoso-
phist project of rehabilitating visionary trance by stripping it of its passive
connotations, and how it was with this general background that the word was
introduced as a description of Asian and specifically Buddhist meditation
practices, it is useful to return to Eliades description of Tantric practices, dis-
cussed above. Indeed, it is notable that even though Eliade glosses the word
visualize as creative imagination, he also takes pains to clarify that he
does not mean ordinary imagination, and that in visualization there is, as he
puts it, no question of abandoning oneself to a pure spontaneity and passively
receiving the content of . . . individual or collective unconscious.71 Eliades
forceful exclusion here of any hint of passivity bears more than a trace of a
resemblance to late nineteenth-century criticisms of trance. It is further inter-
esting to note that despite Eliades insistence about the matter, earlier scholars
who had investigated Buddhist Tantric ritual texts had quite often chosen to
describe them as making use of imagination tout court.72
This replacing of imagination with visualization as the word of choice
to describe Tantric meditation practices, which seems to have first begun with
Evans-Wentz, is consonant with a broader evolution, between the late nine-
teenth and mid-twentieth century, of the Western-language terminology used
to describe Buddhist meditation, an evolution in which we can observe a con-
ceptual shift that in many ways parallels the transition from passive Spiritu-
alist trance to active Theosophist cultivation. In the case of the kasia medi-
tations we can see this quite clearly. Visualization was first used to describe
the kasia meditations by none other than Evans-Wentz, who as mentioned
above was also the first to use this word in reference to Tantric s adhana
70
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (London: Henry Frowde, 1911),
48587.
71
Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, 207. Though visualize (or rather, the French visu-
alizer) appears in Le Yoga: Immortalit e et libert
e , published in 1954, Eliade did not use this word
in the corresponding sections of the earlier published versions of this material, namely, the revision
of his doctoral thesis, Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique Indienne (Paris: Paul Geuthner,
1936), nor in the later condensed version of this work aimed at a popular audience, Techniques du
yoga (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). I have not been able to consult Eliades original (and as far as I
know, unpublished) dissertation, written in English in 1933 (The Psychology of Indian Medita-
tion), but it seems likely that Eliade adopted the word visualize only sometime between 1948
and 1954. On the history of Eliades books on yoga, see David Gordon White, Introduction to the
2009 Edition, in Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, xiiixvi.
72
Louis de La Valle Poussin, Bouddhisme: Etudes et Mat
eriaux, Adikarmapradpa, Bodhi-
caryavat
araka (London: Luzac, 1898), 153.

rituals.73 Earlier scholars, in contrast, had described the kasia meditations

using words such as mesmeric trance74 or hypnosis,75 thereby evoking pre-
cisely the kinds of things that groups such as the Theosophical Society were
keen to reject.76 Prior to Sopers description of them as based on visualiza-
tion, Western writers had often explained the practices from the Immeasurable
Life Contemplation in similar terms.77
The shift here from words like hypnosis that evoked passive, trancelike
practices to a forceful emphasis on the active nature of Buddhist meditation
also occurred in the explanations and translations of other technical terms. As
one of several definitions of jh
ana (Skt. dhyana), perhaps the most basic term
for Buddhist meditation, Robert Childerss 1872 Pali dictionary thus gives
trance, a word that, as we have seen, had quite specific associations at this
time.78 However, fifty years later, in 1921, the dictionary of the Pali Text
Society specifically refutes this translation, claiming that: [ jh
ana implies]
no suggestion of trance, but rather of an enhanced vitality.79
We see here traces of a debate, one that eventually succeeded in re-present-
ing Buddhist meditation in a positive light to a certain segment of Western
73
Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, 41.
74
Robert Childers, A Dictionary of the P ali Language (London: Trubner, 1872), 191.
75
See Caroline Rhys-Davidss introduction to Woodwards translation of the so-called Yoga-
vacaras manual. F. L. Woodward, Manual of a Mystic (London: Pali Text Society, 1916), xii.
76
That this kind of terminology would be applied to the initial description of Buddhist medita-
tion practices may have some connection to early interest in Asian meditation practices on the
part of American mesmerists. As David Schmit has shown, as early as 1842 Asian meditative prac-
ticesmostly Indian yogawere occasionally being held up as proof that the techniques of mes-
merism were indeed universal and hence indubitably true. See David T. Schmit, The Mesmerists
Inquire about Oriental Mind Powers: West Meets East in the Search for the Universal Trance,
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46, no. 1 (2010): 126.
77
C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Eastern Meditation, in Psychology and Religion: West and
East, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 55875 (originally published
in German in 1943 under the title Zur Psychologie ostlicher Meditation). Using Takukusus 1894
English translation of the text, Jung interpreted the practices here, in particular the first meditation
on the setting sun, as similar to hypnosis. Note that Jungs general conclusion was that these prac-
tices are not suitable for Westerners. On Jungs reading of this text, see Luis O. Gomez, Oriental
Wisdom and the Cure of Souls: Jung and the Indian East, in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of
Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 197250.
78
Childers, A Dictionary of the P ali Language, 169.
79
T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, eds., The Pali Text Societys Pali-English Dictionary
(London: Pali Text Society, 1921), 286. This new association between jh ana and vitality or
activity is prefiguredamong other places no doubtin Henry Steel Olcotts A Buddhist Cate-
chism, where in response to the question of whether or not in the final stage of jh ana the mind is a
blank and thought is arrested, it is replied that Quite the contrary. It is then that ones conscious-
ness is most intensely active, and ones power to gain knowledge correspondingly vast. See
Henry Steel Olcott, The Buddhist Catechism, 42nd ed. (London and Benares: Theosophical Pub-
lishing Society, 1903), no. 276, emphasis mine. Olcott here writes j~nana, but it is clear from the
context that he means jh ana. The first edition of The Buddhist Catechism (London: Trubner,
1881) did not yet include this later section of the text. It is unclear at what point it was added.

society by, among other things, stripping it of any association with passivity.
This change in understanding accompanied and was effectuated by the use of
terminology such as visualization. Indeed, in order for a favorable interpre-
tation of Buddhist meditation to take hold in the West this shift in terminology,
away from words emphasizing passivity, was likely necessary.80 As scholars
have documented in recent years, prior to the middle of the nineteenth century
most Western studies of Buddhism ultimately aimed to demonstrate the supe-
riority of Christianity, and the image of Buddhism thus paintedoften by mis-
sionaries with firsthand exposure to Buddhist practiceswas generally nega-
tive. Although Buddhist meditation was not a major focus of this literature,
when it was discussed it was usually in similarly unfavorable terms, as so many
dreamy states that reduced monks to idiocy or apathy.81 Meditation, in
short, exemplified the general image of Buddhism as otherworldly, passive,
and pessimistic, characteristics explicitly contrasted with a this-worldly, opti-
mistic, and active Christianity.82
In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new,
more positive view of Buddhism emerged in the West. First advocated by
scholars who had begun reading Buddhist texts in their original languages,
this new portrait of Buddhism was eventually absorbed, directly or indirectly,
by the wider public. This newfound appreciation for Buddhism was not, how-
ever, based on a sudden interest in just what earlier Western authors had con-
demnedpessimistic and passive Buddhism did not suddenly become
appealing where it had before appeared diabolical. Rather, Buddhism itself
was reframed in terms that were compatible with late-Victorian values.83 The
new image of Buddhism that emerged in the West during this time was thus
not merely more favorable than what had circulated beforeit was often a pre-
cise mirror image. The Buddha himself went from god to man,84 and so too
80
However, as mentioned above (see n. 76), it does seem that even prior to this shift in presen-
tation at least some in the West saw value in Asian meditation practices conceived along the lines
of mesmeric trance. Such occasional interest, however, cannot compare with the explosive growth
in such interest that occurred later.
81
Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 12021. Thus according to one missionary writing in 1834, Chinese Buddhist monks
spent hour after hour in contemplation and apathy. Philiosinensis [sic], Remarks on Bud-
dhism, The Chinese Repository 2 (1834): 222. For other similar reports, see Bernard Faure, Chan
Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Prin-
ceton University Press, 1993), 44 n. 38.
82
Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism, 4146.
83
I take this to be one of principle conclusions of Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter
with Buddhism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), who shows that late nineteenth-
century Americans became interested in Buddhism only to the extent that they were able to con-
ceptualize it as a tradition that supported core Victorian values such as individualism, optimism,
and activism.
84
Lopez, From Stone to Flesh.

Buddhist meditation went from being a passive, trancelike state to something

that produced, in the words of the 1921 dictionary of the Pali Text Society cited
above, an enhanced vitality.
This shift in understandingoften encoded in new terminology such as
visualization that purported to simply describe what certain Buddhist medi-
tation practices arewas at times forcefully promoted by Buddhist enthusiasts
and Asian missionaries. D. T. Suzuki, to take one particularly clear example,
thus wrote in 1906 that he would refute the grave error that understands
Buddhist meditation, dhy ana, to be a form of trance or self-hypnotism.85
Trance, Suzuki explains, is a pathological disturbance of consciousness, a
self-illusion which is entirely subjective and cannot be objectively verified,
whereas Buddhist meditation is not passive at all but is all animation, all
activity.86 It is no doubt significant here that Suzuki had been introduced to
Western occult literature, including the writings of Blavatsky, several years
before this,87 and this seems to explain how in these passages he is able to so
clearly echo Theosophist and other occult criticisms of Spiritualist trance.
visionary meditation in fifth-century chinese buddhism

There are surely further episodes in the history of visualization. For my pur-
poses, however, it is enough to have seen that the concept of visualization
was developed as a way of expressing specific nuances of meaning within a
particular polemical context. To a certain extent this should not come as a sur-
priseindeed many, if not most, of the concepts that we now routinely use to
describe psychological processes have similarly recent and specific histo-
ries.88 In any domain, such historicity is not, to be sure, in itself an argument
85
Soyen Shaku and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot (Chicago: Open Court,
1906), 155. Nominally here translating sermons delivered in Japanese by Shaku Soyen, Suzuki
admits in the introduction that he reworked the material to make it comprehensible to a Western
audience. Certainly in the passages cited above we must understand the text as more or less coming
from Suzukis hand.
86
Ibid., 157.
87
Thomas A. Tweed, American Occultism and Japanese Buddhism: Albert J. Edmunds, D. T.
Suzuki, and Translocative History, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 32, no. 2 (2005): 249
81. Suzuki was first introduced to the writings of prominent figures such as Blavatsky, Sweden-
borg, and Frederic Meyers (a founder of the Society for Psychical Research) in 1903. In 1911
Suzuki married a Theosophist, Beatrice Lane, with whom he later opened a branch of the Theo-
sophical Society in Kyoto. On the short-lived influence of Theosophy on late nineteenth-century
Japanese Buddhist modernizers, see Yoshinaga Shinichi, Theosophy and Buddhist Reformers in
the Middle of the Meiji Period: An Introduction, Japanese Religions 34, no. 2 (2009): 11931.
See also Yoshinaga Shinichi, Suzuki Daitetsu and Swedenborg: A Historical Background, in
Modern Buddhism in Japan, ed. Otani Eiichi, Hayashi Makoto, and Paul L. Swanson (Nagoya:
Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2014), 11243.
88
Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found
Its Language (London: SAGE, 1997).

against the reality of what is thereby denoted. My aim here, at least, has not
been merely to expose the concept of visualization as a historically con-
structed one, but rather to use the specific details of its historical construction
so as to better understand just what this concept means.
For Galton, visualization was distinguished by its interiority, by a particu-
lar kind of photographic vividness, and as a nonpathological faculty of mind.
For Theosophists, visualization explained clairvoyant visions as the product
of cultivated, controlled capacities rather than the fruits of passive trance. We
can thus think of visualization, as it came to be used in the context of West-
ern scholarship on Buddhist meditation, as circumscribed by three qualities
photographic objectivity, interiority, and active personal agency. One who
claims to visualize something is thus claiming to produce, through her own
will and volition, an internal, mental visual image possessed of the same or
nearly the same objectivity as an external object. Such a concept is carefully
opposed to a cluster of related terms. Visualization is not simply seeing,
since its object is not out there. Nor, however, is it simply imagining, since
it creates perfectly objective representations that are experienced as visual
perceptions. But, finally, it is also not hallucinating (or having a vision), since
it is a controlled, self-generated, active state with none of the late-Victorian
stigma associated with passive trance.
Visualization is thus delicately contrasted with a number of potentially
similar terms (imagining, seeing, hallucinating, having a vision), and indeed it
is precisely in such contrasts that the meaning of the word is to be found. Thus
if we wish to use this word as the translation or explanation of terminology or
concepts found in traditional Buddhist (or other) texts, we would ideally need
to show that a similar set of contrasts was also operative; we would need to
show that the Buddhists texts or practices in question were similarly interested
in distinguishing the same or similar things that are distinguished when we
contrast visualization with imagination, hallucination, or anything else.
Owing to limitations of space, but even more of my own competencies, I
cannot subject to close scrutiny all the areas within Buddhism, let alone other
religious traditions, where scholars typically speak of visualization medita-
tion. I will, rather, look closely at one such areafifth-century Chinawith
an eye to comparing what is described in this material to the specific contours
of visualization as discussed above.
As mentioned, the fifth-century Chinese Buddhist material most closely
associated by modern scholars with visualization meditation is a body of texts
known as the Contemplation Scriptures,89 and, even more specifically, the
89
The first modern scholar to have identified these texts as a group was Mochizuki Shinko
, Bukky oten seiritsu shiron (Kyoto: Hozokan, 1946). Mochizuki found
o ky
seven such texts listed in traditional Chinese catalogs, of which six survive. Elsewhere I have pro-

Immeasurable Life Contemplation, a text that, in the reading favored by

many, directs practitioners in series of graded exercises leading to a vision of
the Buddha Amitabha and his pure land.90 Although the Contemplation Scrip-
tures remain the best-known examples, in recent years scholars have also
begun examining a number of other historically and linguistically related texts
that, like the Contemplation Scriptures, seem to have appeared (or, more
likely, have been composed) in China during the first half of the fifth century
and which propose meditation methods that place a similar emphasis on
visionary experience.91
All of these texts describe what I will begin by calling visionary medita-
tionthey present methods of meditation that will supposedly lead to see-
ing ( jian ) various extraordinary things. In the Contemplation Scriptures,
the goal is usually seeing various buddhas (or, in some of the texts, bodhisatt-
vas), but other texts are more varied. Thus in the Secret Essential Methods of
Meditation (Chan mi yao fa jing ), to which I will refer in some
detail below, we read that during the contemplation of the water element
(guan shui da ): [The meditator] sees his body as a pond of green
water [as pure as] an uncontaminated mountain spring. He sees seven flowers,
the color of pure adamantine. They radiate a golden light, within which is an
adamantine man holding a sharp sword who beheads the six dragons. He then
sees fire emerge from the mouths of the dragons, which burns throughout [the
meditators] body drying up all the water and then going out. When the fire
posed that part of the supposedly lost text, the Scripture on the Contemplation of Avalokite svara
(Guanshiyin guan jing ), is extant under a different name. See Eric M. Greene, Medi-
tation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Early Medieval Chinese Buddhism (PhD diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 2012), 32841. David Quinter has also recently argued that
another extant text devoted to Ma~njusr, the Wenshushili boniepan jing (T.463)
should also be included in this group. David Quinter, Visualizing the Ma~ nju aa Sutra
sr Parinirv
as a Contemplation Sutra, Asia Major, 3rd ser., 23, no. 2 (2010): 97128.
90
As discussed above, the first scholar to systematically argue that these practices should be
thought of as visualizations was Alexander Soper, though the word visualize itself first
appeared in reference to these texts somewhat earlier, in the title of a 1939 English translation of
the Immeasurable Life Contemplation, The Sutra of Visualizing the Buddha of Immeasurable
Length of Life, trans. Bhikkhu Assaji (Hong Kong: International Buddhist Propaganda Associa-
tion, 1939). Soper argued that in all of the Contemplation Scriptures: the supreme religious expe-
rience is to see [the chosen deity], face to faceand not in Paradise, but here and now (Soper, Lit-
erary Evidence, 223, emphasis in original). It is worth noting that this interpretation runs contrary
to at least some of the traditional interpretations of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation in East
Asia. The Japanese Pure Land schools in particular hold that the message of this text is precisely
that complex meditation is not necessary, and that the simpler practice of reciting the Buddhas
name is sufficient (this practice is introduced toward the end of the text, after the more complex
meditations have been presented).
91
For a survey of this material, see Nobuyoshi Yamabe, The Sutra on the Ocean-like Samadhi
of the Visualization of the Buddha: The Interfusion of the Chinese and Indian Cultures in Central
Asia as Reflected in a Fifth Century Apocryphal Sutra (PhD diss., Yale University, 1999), 59
112.

and water have both disappeared, he sees his own body become gradually
whiter until [as white as] adamantine.92 In these texts meditation is thus not
usually presented as the development of particular psychological factors or as
coming to understand Buddhist principles and truths (such as we find in many
traditional treatises on Buddhist spiritual cultivation), but as an elaborate
visionary journey.93
The question remains, however, whether visualization provides an accu-
rate description of this visionary journey. In the following pages I will address
this question primarily in terms of the active/passive dichotomy that I above
argued has been crucial in the modern Western understanding of Buddhist
meditation. Fifth-century Chinese meditation texts, I will suggest, are not par-
ticularly interested in this dichotomy. In other words, they are not particularly
interested in the distinction embodied in the contrast between visualizing
and hallucinating. I will further suggest that photographic lucidity and sta-
bilitywhat distinguishes visualization from imaginationalso does
not play a particularly important role here; correct or skilled meditation is not
differentiated from incorrect meditation in terms of the clarity of the practi-
tioners mental imagery if by clarity we mean the degree to which it is phe-
nomenologically similar to visual perception.
the sun contemplation

The first of the Immeasurable Life Contemplations sixteen contemplations
(guan ), or visualizations as they are often called, is the sun contempla-
tion (ri guan ), or again sun visualization. Here, through some kind of
mental effort (precisely what kind of mental effort is what I wish to question),
the practitioner gains a vision of the setting sun, a first, partial glimpse of
Amitabhas pure land. In the subsequent contemplations the practitioner
comes to see ever more features of the pure land, which are described in
92

(T.613:15.260c1217).
93
Yamabe Nobuyoshi has also noted that the undated and fragmentary Sanskrit meditation text
found in Central Asia (usually called the Yogalehrbuch following the title given by Dieter
Schlingloff, who first edited the text) describes practices that, in terms of their emphasis on vision-
ary meditation, bear much resemblance to the fifth-century Chinese texts. Nobuyoshi Yamabe,
The Significance of the Yogalehrbuch for the Investigation into the Origin of Chinese Meditation
Texts, Bukkyo Bunka 9 (1999): 175. The edited text of the Yogalehrbuch can be found in Dieter
Schlingloff, Ein Buddhistisches Yogalehrbuch: Texband, vol. 7, Sanskrittexte aus den Turfanfun-
den (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1964). For studies of its contents, in addition to the work of
Yamabe cited above see David Seyfort Ruegg, On a Yoga Treatise in Sanskrit from Qizil, Jour-
nal of the American Oriental Society 87, no. 2 (1967): 15765; Sven Bretfeld, Visuelle Reprasen-
tation im sogenannten Yoga-Lehrbuch au Qzl, in Indien und Zentralasien: Sprach- und Kul-
turkontakt, ed. Sven Bretfeld and Jens Wilkens (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowtiz, 2003), 167205.

increasing detail. The sun contemplation itself is comparatively straightfor-

ward: Sitting upright, face west and contemplate (guan ) the sun, fixing
your mind firmly, single-mindedly imagining (xiang ) [it] without shifting
[your attention]. You see ( jian ) the setting sun, its form like a floating
drum. Having seen the sun, make it clearly apparent whether your eyes are
open or closed.94 I here translate the verbs guan and xiang, which in this and
subsequent sections describe the actively undertaken mental efforts of the
practitioner, as contemplate and imagine respectively, since as mentioned
above these words can, in other contexts, readily take discursive or abstract
rather than distinctly visual objects. In the context of fifth-century Buddhist
meditation texts these words have often been translated by modern scholars
simply as visualize.95 However, even if we were to object to that translation
per se, it does at first glance seem reasonable to construe the overall process
here as something that can rightly be called visualization. After all, the medi-
tator is instructed to direct the mind toward a certain object, the sun, in such a
way that he then comes to see it.96
However, to call this process visualizing may impute an assumption of
active conscious control that is not necessarily justified. Indeed, the text by
itself does not actually say what kind of relationship exists between the
imagining (xiang) done by the meditator and the seeing of the sun that
eventually results. That the situation may have been presumed more compli-
cated (and interesting) than simply visualizing the sun is suggested by Shan-
daos (613681) seventh-century commentary to the sun contempla-
tion passage, the earliest surviving commentary on the practical procedures
of meditation recommended by this text.97
According to Shandao, contemplating the sun the mind gradually becomes
calm, until at a certain point the sun appears (xian ).98 However as Shan-
94

(T.365:12.341c30342a2).
95
The word xiang is also sometimes discussed as to visualize in other areas of medieval
Chinese thought. See Tian Xiaofei, Seeing with the Minds Eye: The Eastern Jin Discourse of
Visualization and Imagination, Asia Major, 3rd ser., 18, no. 2 (2005): 67102.
96
In some fifth-century texts the practitioner is directed to begin by contemplating (guan )
an external object such as a statue of the Buddha until the image in question can be seen even when
the eyes are closed. See Yamabe, The Sutra on the Ocean-like Samadhi of the Visualization of
the Buddha, 1117. This amounts to applying the technique from the kasia and corpse medita-
tions to Buddhist icons, a practice that is, so far, only attested in Chinese texts.
97
Surviving earlier commentaries tend to focus on the texts doctrinal content. Shandaos com-
mentary is included in the Taisho under the title Commentary to the Immeasurable Life Contem-
plation (Guan wu liang shou fo jing shu ; T.1753).
98
Here it should be born in mind that the Chinese words see ( jian ) and appear (xian )
are often interchangeable, and indeed the character is itself sometimes read as xian. It might
thus be said that the notion of seeing invoked here is already slightly different than what the
English word to see conveys. We thus generally find within these meditation texts a sharp con-

dao then further explains: When the vision [of the sun] appears it will be as
big as a coin, or else as big as the face of a mirror. On its bright surface there
will appear signs (xiang ) [indicating] the extent of the practitioners karmic
obstructions (ye zhang ). The first of these is the black obstruction, like a
black cloud shading the sun. The second is the yellow obstruction, like a yel-
low cloud shading the sun. The third is the white obstruction, like a white
cloud shading the sun.99 If the practitioner discerns any of these signs, he
must then perform a ritual of repentance (chan hui ), first decorating a
shrine, then making offerings to the buddhas, and finally confessing his trans-
gressions. Upon returning to meditation, if the vision transforms into a cloud-
free sun, this means that repentance has been successful; alternatively, the
cloud-like obstruction may simply change to a lighter shade, which means that
the transgressions have been weakened, but not eliminated, and further repen-
tance will be necessary.
Shandaos explanation of the sun contemplation introduces a number of
important points about how visionary meditation was thought to take place
that we will see repeated in other fifth-century texts. But for now what I want
to note is that, for Shandao, the practice here is not simply a matter of direct-
ing ones mental powers toward the visualization of some pregiven thing that
then slowly takes shape before the minds eye. Indeed, precisely what the med-
itator sees upon contemplating the sun is potentially unexpected. Further-
more, seeing something other than the bright sun does not simply mean that
one must try harder to visualize the correct object. Rather, depending on what
she sees the meditator might need to do something else entirely, namely a ritual
of repentance that has the power to transform the vision into the correct one.
We might then say that, at least for Shandao, the sun contemplation is not so
much about visualizing the sun so as to achieve some hoped for result, but
about using the content of a vision to divine something about the need for cer-
tain rituals. Although the practitioner is supposed to be actively engaged in
some kind of personal mental endeavorcontemplatingthe agency that
leads to the meditator seeing what she eventually sees is more diffuse.
This more diffuse notion of agency allows the practices imagined here to
be carried out in ways that seem entirely incompatible with the notion of visu-
trast between words such guan , contemplate, that denote the active side of the meditation,
and the word jian ,see (or appear), which reflects a more passive vision that is obtained as
a result. This contrast indeed reflects Chinese grammar, which sharply distinguishes attempted
sensory perception (trying to see something) from successful perception. The contrast between
looking, kan , and seeing, jian or kanjian , is the example of this known to all first-
year students of modern Mandarin, but literary Chinese makes a similar contrast between shi
(or indeed guan ) and jian , and also with ting and wen in the cases of hearing. On these
points, see Jane Geaney, On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 41.
99

(T.1753:37.261c29262a2).

alization. Thus elsewhere Shandao describes how the practices in the Immea-
surable Life Contemplation (and certain other related texts) are to be used in
deathbed ritual. He here explains that if the result of the dying persons con-
templation (guan) of the Buddha Amitabha is a vision attesting to sin (zui
), other people in attendance must help the dying person by invoking the
Buddha and repenting, and this combined effort can help to transform what
the dying person sees into a vision of imminent rebirth in the pure land.100
meditative visions in the secret essential

methods of meditation
The basic understanding that we see in Shandaos writings about how medita-
tive visions are produced, though not explicit within the Immeasurable Life
Contemplation itself, is shared by other fifth-century Chinese meditation
texts. Perhaps the clearest examples are found in the Secret Essential Methods
of Meditation, discussed briefly above. Although the Secret Essential Meth-
ods of Meditation presents a bewildering variety of meditation practices (as
well as detailed descriptions of the truly kaleidoscopic visions that successful
meditators will supposedly obtain), much of the text is structured around what
medieval Chinese sources call the white bone contemplation (bai gu guan
), a technique derived from the ancient Buddhist practice of meditating
on decaying corpses.101 In the white bone contemplation, the meditator does
not use an actual corpse, but simply imagines his own body as a skeleton by
progressively stripping away the outer skin and flesh.102 The initial instruc-
tions for this practice are as follows: First, fix your thoughts on the tip of your
left big toe. Carefully contemplate one half of the toe and imagine a swelling.
Carefully contemplate until this is very clear. Then, imagine a burst-open
100
T.1959:47.24b2128. These instructions are found in Shandaos Method for the Seven Day
Ritual Recollection of the Buddha as Elucidated in the Inquiry Chapter of the Pratyutpanna-
sam adhi Scripture (Banzhou sanmei jing qing wen pin ming qi ri qi ye ru dao chang nian fo sanmei
fa ). For an English translation of this text, see
Hisao Inagaki, Shan-taos Exposition of the Method of Contemplation on Amida Buddha (parts 1,
2, and 3), Pacific World 13 (19992001): 7789, 20728, 7788.
101
Indic-language sources usually refer to the white bone contemplation simply as the a subha-
bhavan a . See Pradhan, Abhidharmako ayam of Vasubandhu, 338.510. On the asubha-
sabh
bhavan a in Sarvastivadin sources, see KL Dhammajoti, The Asubha Meditation in the Sarva-
stivada, Journal of the Centre for Buddhist Studies (Sri Lanka) 7 (2009): 24895.
102
As in the Immeasurable Life Contemplation, the principal verbs that describe the medita-
tors mental activity are here guan (contemplate) and xiang (imagine). In Indian mate-
rial corresponding to the white bone contemplation, we find the verb adhiHmuc (or, as a noun,
adhimoka), in this context often translated as visualize. Etymologically, however, adhiHmuc
is entirely unconnected to seeing per se, and its literal meaning is something closer to resolve or
conviction. See David Seyfort Ruegg, Buddha-Nature, Mind and the Problem of Gradualism in
a Comparative Perspective: On the Transmission and Reception of Buddhism in India and Tibet
(London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992), 46.

swelling. When you see the bone [beneath the burst-open swelling], make it
extremely white and pure, as if glowing with white light. Having seen these
things, next contemplate the entire toe, stripping away the flesh until you see
the bone, making it extremely bright and clear, as if glowing with white
light.103 From here, the meditator must continue, working through his entire
body in this manner.104
If the instructions in the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation were lim-
ited to this, visualization might indeed be a reasonable description, as the
text here appears to recommend the gradual, controlled, and active production
of a detailed visual scene. However, when we consider how these instructions
fit with the program of the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation as a whole,
a somewhat different perspective emerges. For success in the white bone con-
templation is not based on how well, if at all, the meditator comes to see the
various prescribed things. It is, rather, judged by what can only be described
as a sudden vision. Thus, for example, the practitioner will know that he has
attained the first stage of the white bone contemplation when:
Four yaka-demons105 suddenly spring out of the ground, their eyes flaming and their
tongues like poisonous snakes. [Each] has six heads, and each head is differentone
like a mountain, one like a cat, one like a tiger, one like a dog, one like a wolf, and
one like a rat. [Each of the demons] two hands are like those of an ape, and the tips of
each of their ten fingers are poisonous snakes with four heads: one spraying water,
one spraying dirt, one spraying rock, and one spraying fire. The [ yaka-demons] left
legs resemble those of kumbh aa-demons, and their right legs those of pi sac
a-
demons. Their horrid appearance is truly frightful. The four yakas then stand in a
line before the practitioner, each bearing on its back the nine kinds of corpses.106
This remarkable vision then is characterized as the first jingjie of the

white bone contemplation. In medieval Chinese Buddhist texts the word jing-
jie was used to translate a number of different Indian terms such as alambana,
viaya, or j~
neya, all of which refer to the object of either the mind or a sensory
103

(T.613:15.243b28c02).
104
The instructions become quite elaborate, and the meditator must also imagine his internal or-
gans, the worms that dwell in them, and various other things.
105
Yakas are not always evil or demonic, but in this text they seem to have this character.
106

(T.613:15.244a1623). Here the
nine kinds of corpses refers to the nine possible corpses listed in meditation texts associated with
the a
subha-bhavana.

organ.107 But in the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation, as well as in

other fifth-century Chinese meditation texts and the later literature they
inspired, jingjie does not refer to the object of meditation in the sense of
what the meditator must try to bring to mind, imagine, or contemplate. It
refers, rather, to the object (which in most cases seems describable as a
vision) whose sudden appearance confirms or verifies that a certain level of
meditation has been reached.108 As we consider the applicability of a word
like visualization, the key point here is that the object or objects of medita-
tion that the practitioner consciously chooses do not necessarily have the same
content as the object of meditation that confirms success.
These confirmatory visions, as I will call them, take many forms. For
example in the eleventh section of the Secret Essential Methods of Medita-
tion, the meditator is instructed to progressively imagine his own skeleton
with sunlight radiating from its joints. But, it is then said, this meditation has
been attained (de ) only when: [The meditator] suddenly sees a sixteen-
foot buddha within the sunlight. Its halo measures six feet horizontally and six
feet vertically. Its golden body radiates light all over, brilliant and majestic.
Its thirty-two major marks and eighty minor marks are distinctly apparent.
Each major and minor mark is clearly visible, exactly as when the Buddha
was still present in the world.109 Again, the text is not prescribing this scene
as something the practitioner should imagine or visualize. This is, rather, a
description of the vision that will supposedly manifest as confirmation that
imagining sunlight radiating from the skeleton has been successful. As the
Secret Essential Methods of Meditation progresses, more and more space is
devoted to these increasingly elaborate confirmatory visions. We also find
many accounts of inauspicious visions, also confirmatory though in this
case, as in Shandaos account of the sun contemplation, what they confirm is
the presence of sin and thus the need for repentance.
107
Nakamura Hajime , Bukky ogo daijiten (Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki, 1988),
23839; Hirakawa Akira , Bukky o Kanbon daijiten (Tokyo: Reiyukai, Hat-
subaimoto Innatorippusha, 1997), 302. Hirakawa gives twenty-seven Sanskrit equivalents, but many
of these are not relevant in the present context.
108
The use of sudden visions as signs that meditation has been successful is also found in the
context of Tantric sadhana practice. See Janet Gyatso, The Ins and Outs of Self-Transformation:
Personal and Social Sides of Visionary Practice in Tibetan Buddhism, in Self and Self-Transfor-
mation in the History of Religions, ed. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 18394. Concerning the use of visions as signs of attainment in earlier,
proto-Tantric ritual centered on the recitation of spells, see Shinohara, Spells, Images, and
Maalas.
109

(T.613:15.248
a1215).

We may say, therefore, that while the Secret Essential Methods of Medita-
tion does present meditation as, in part, the active focusing of the mind on spe-
cified, visually rich objects or scenessuch as carefully imagining the flesh
stripping away from the bodythe goal of the practice is not simply the gen-
eration of these prescribed mental states. Successful meditation is not judged
by the meditators ability to intentionally alter his consciousness in given
ways. It is rather confirmed, or we might even say divined, on the basis of sud-
den, unanticipated visions.
On the one hand, then, we cannot describe the overall course of meditation
as presented by this text as simply a matter of visualization. But even more
than this, the importance of what I am calling confirmatory visions suggests
that visualization does not properly characterize even those actual techniques
of meditation that involve the detailed imagination of visual imagery. Indeed,
by emphasizing confirmatory visions, the Secret Essential Methods of Medi-
tation puts aside questions about the phenomenology of the practices them-
selvesor, at least, it puts aside the kinds of questions that we would need to
ask in order to distinguish between visualizing and imagining. A practi-
tioner must imagine (xiang) the flesh rotting away from her skeleton. But
does this mean imagining in a loose way? Or visualizing, that is to say, really
seeing with photograph-like clarity? From the perspective of the text, this
question is irrelevant. What it means to properly imagine the white bones is
not judged by virtue of this imagining itself possessing a distinctive, photo-
graph-like phenomenology. It is, rather, judged by the subsequently appearing
confirmatory vision, a vision for which it is not eidetic quality but content
what it is a vision ofthat is highlighted as most significant.
We may thus say that the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation accepts,
and indeed expects there to be, a certain discontinuity between the techniques
and results of meditation. This discontinuity, which amounts to a disregard
for what we would consider a rational sequence of psychological cause and
effect, is further seen in that confirmatory visions occur even when the techni-
ques of meditation do not involve visual imagery. In one exercise, for exam-
ple, the meditator is instructed to contemplate the abstruse Buddhist doctrine
of non-self, following an entirely discursive formula based on traditional cate-
gories of analysis such as the five aggregates (skandha) and the twelve links
of dependent origination ( prattyasamutp ada):
[The practitioner] should then consider (si wei ): Within my person, is the hair
the self ? The bones? The nails? The teeth? [Any of the five aggregates of ] form, feel-
ings, perceptions, volitional formations, or consciousness? Carefully contemplating,
is the self ignorance, volitional formations, consciousness, name-and-form, the six
sense-doors, contact, feeling, attachment, grasping, becoming, birth, or old age and
death? . . . These many forms are in truth not the self, but deluded beings falsely think

that they are, while those with false views think they are the selfs possession. Every-
thing is like an illusion, so where could there be a self ? Amongst illusory phenomena,
what could be the selfs possession?110
Although there is no mention of anything that we would even be tempted to

characterize as visualizing, here too success is said to be confirmed by a sud-
den vision:
He suddenly sees the bones of his body to be bright, pure, and lovely, with all kinds
of marvelous things appearing within them. He further sees his body as like beryl,
completely transparent. Just as a person looking up while carrying a beryl parasol can
see everything in the sky clearly, at this time the practitioner, because he has contem-
plated emptiness and learned the teaching of non-self with respect to both internal
and external things, sees his two legs as like tubes of beryl, and [through them]111 sees
in the downward direction all kinds of marvelous things.112
The appearance of confirmatory visions here is thus in no way predicated on

the practitioner actively producing mental visual imagery. The vision is unan-
ticipated inasmuch as its content is not prefigured by the practices that pro-
duce it.
Although it is only in technical treatises such as the Secret Essential Meth-
ods of Meditation that the full logic of these confirmatory visions is made
clear, the basic features of this model are found even in sources of a much dif-
ferent kind. According to the late fifth-century Buddhist miracle-tale collec-
tion the Signs from the Unseen Realm (Ming xiang ji ), the nun Tanhui
(422504) had an early proclivity for meditation: When she was six
years old she began to enjoy practicing meditation (chan ). Whenever she
meditated she easily attained confirmatory visions ( jingjie ). But she did
not understand what these were, and thought them to be merely dreams . . .
when she turned ten the foreign meditation master Kalayasas113 came to Shu
110

{}
. . .

(T.613:15.252b27c21).
111
The idea seems to be that the practitioner is seated in a typical cross-legged meditation pos-
ture.
112

(T.613:15.252.c2127).
113
It is perhaps significant that Kalayasas was eventually remembered as the transla-
tor of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation. Though this attribution is likely incorrect (inasmuch
as the text was likely composed in China), it may show that Kalayasas was indeed associated with
the circles where the visionary meditation methods I am here discussing were becoming popular.

[where Tanhui lived]. She presented to him what she had seen, whereupon
[Kalayasas] and the nun [Fayu], realizing that Tanhui already had attainment
in meditation, encouraged her to ordain as a nun.114 In the logic of the story,
Tanhui undertakes her meditation without knowing what might ultimately
count as confirmation. Indeed the confirmatory visions she eventually experi-
encesand it is significant that the story describes these visions using the
technical word jingjieare so unexpected that she does not even realize what
they are. Tanhuis experience of these visions is furthermore compared to a
dream, an analogy clearly not intended to dismiss their importance. For the
author of this story, no difficulty is occasioned by a passive dream-like
vision serving as the sign of successful meditation.
meditation as divination
Among other things, Tanhuis story reveals the inherently semiotic character
of confirmatory visions. These visions do not count as confirmation of med-
itative attainment by virtue of a particular, privately accessible phenomenol-
ogy (such as being indistinguishable from visual perception). Rather, they are
assumed to be significant because of what they mean. For this reason they
require interpretation, and this is what makes it conceivable that Tanhui could
have reached a certain attainment without realizing it.
The process here whereby the meditation master Kalayasas interprets the
significance of Tanhuis vision has a number of interesting parallels with divi-
nation, and this comparison may offer a way of conceptualizing these prac-
tices that steers clear of a strict active-passive dichotomy. Indeed divination is
often both an active process of inquiry and a passive reading of signs pre-
sumed to be the handiwork of a different agency. So too in fifth-century Chi-
nese Buddhist visionary meditation practices, though the meditator begins by
consciously directing the mind toward certain things, this leads to visions that
must be read for information. This parallel between meditation and divination
comes out clearly when the visions are interpreted in terms of need for, or pre-
vious success in, rituals of repentance, a procedure discussed above in con-
nection with Shandaos explanations of the Immeasurable Life Contempla-
tion, but one that figures prominently in many fifth-century meditation texts.
More generally, when we read, as in some texts, that confirmatory visions will
114

(T.2122:53.453a2026). This passage is preserved in the seventh-century encyclope-
dia Forest of Pearls from the Garden of the Dharma (Fa yuan zhu lin ). For a different
translation of this passage, see Robert Ford Campany, Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Mir-
acle Tales from Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 22324.

occur during meditation or in a dream, the line between meditation and oniro-
mancy (dream-divination), perennially popular in medieval China, becomes
fine indeed.115
More broadly, outside of Buddhism the notion of visionary divination was
well-represented within certain Daoist traditions, where there existed prac-
tices designed to produce visionary encounters with gods who could then be
interrogated for information about the future.116 Within fifth-century Chinese
Buddhist meditation texts, in at least some cases the parallels between the
generation of confirmatory visions and divination are so straightforward that
we must assume they were recognized on the ground. The best examples
of this can be seen in the Essential Methods of the Five-Gate Meditation
Scriptures (Wu men chan jing yao yong fa ; hereafter, Five
Gates).117 This text is particularly interesting because it describes the genera-
tion and interpretation of confirmatory visions through an idealized interaction
between student and master, which though not necessarily evidence for how
these practices were actually carried out, does at least bring us closer to under-
standing how they were imagined as taking place.
In the Five Gates, the master prescribes objects for contemplation, and the
practitioner then reports back the various visions that are experienced as a
result. When the practitioner has the correct vision, the master assigns a new
object of meditation, though the master never tells the student what he should
eventually see.118 Sometimes, the master uses these visions in an explicitly
divinatory fashion. In what is perhaps the clearest example of this, the master
first directs the practitioner to bring to mind (nian ) the Buddha. The text
goes on: When the practitioner does this, images of buddhas appear on his
forehead, from one up to uncountable numbers. If the buddhas seen by the
practitioner emerge from his forehead, go a short distance away, and then
return, the instructing teacher should know that this person is one who seeks
115
Scripture on the Contemplation of the Bodhisattva Ak asagarbha (Guan Xukongzang pusa
jing , T.409:13.677c89), and the Oceanic Scripture on the Sam adhi of the Con-
templation of the Buddha (Guan fo san mei hai jing , T.643:15.663a10; 665c29
666a4; 666b1216; c911; c2629). On dream-divination in medieval China, see Jean Pierre
Drege, Clefs des songes de Touen-houang, in Nouvelles contributions aux etudes de Touen-
houang, ed. M. Soymie (Geneve: Droz, 1981), 20549. Note that much like meditation is pre-
sented here, dream-divination often includes the active component of incubationritual or
other procedures undertaken to provoke a revelatory dream. See Michel Strickmann, Mantras et
mandarins: le bouddhisme tantrique en Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 291336.
116
Poul Andersen, Talking to the Gods: Visionary Divination in Early Taoism (the Sanhuang
Tradition), Taoist Resources 5, no. 1 (1994): 124.
117
The Five Gates is closely related to the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation, and may
have served as the basis upon which that text was written. See Greene, Meditation, Repentance,
and Visionary Experience, 100109.
118
In one interesting passage, the goal is for the practitioner to be unable to imagine what the
master prescribes, namely having sexual intercourse with his former lover (T.619:15.328a610).

[the path of] the sravaka. If they go somewhat far away and then return, one
who seeks [the path of] the pratyekabuddha; if they go very far away and then
return, a person of the Great Vehicle.119 The master thus uses the spontane-
ous vision that appears when the practitioner brings to mind the Buddha to
determine which of the three vehicles of Buddhist practice the practitioner
belongs to. Similarly in another passage, the master directs the practitioner to
meditate quietly for seven days, and provides no specific instructions. Based
on the visions that the practitioner experiences and then reports, the master is
able to determine which topic of meditation will be most suitable for further
practice.120
Of course, the material we have at our disposal can only tell us how these
meditation practices were presented ideally, and though the Five Gates sug-
gests that meditation masters were not supposed to tell their students what
visions would count as confirmation, it remains possible that in practice tex-
tual descriptions of confirmatory visions were known in advance and brought
to mind in the midst of meditation. But for my purposes here the important
point is that this is not what was supposed to happen. Later medieval Chinese
Buddhist authors who discussed these practices often explicitly acknowl-
edged this, and in doing so occasionally made clear that confirmatory visions
were considered authentic only when they were not intentionally produced,
that is, we might say, when they were not visualized.121
All of this suggests a further point of comparison between these forms of
visionary meditation and divinationnamely that textual descriptions of con-
firmatory visions might have been intended not as prescriptions for visualiza-
tion, but as something akin to handbooks for the interpretation of meditative
visions. Certainly passages such as that cited above from the Five Gates
would be compatible with such use. But we also find compelling evidence
from the modern traditions that still use and revere some of the same fifth-cen-
tury texts I have been examining. In an observer-participant report of a day-
long retreat at a Taiwanese Buddhist temple centered on the chanting of
Amitabhas name, in both group sessions and silent periods of meditation,
Charles Jones reports that when riding home in a taxi at the end of the day he
experienced a sudden vision of the pure land, complete with trees, ponds, the
119

(T.619:15.325c17326a2).
120
T.619:15.329b26.
121
See, for example, Zhiyis (538597) comments in his Shi chan boluomi ci di fa men
(T.1916:46.486a413), discussing the meditation practices found in the Secret
Methods for Curing Meditation Sickness (Zhi chan bing mi yao fa ), a text that is
closely related to the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation. According to Zhiyi, reading textual
descriptions of the confirmatory visions and then holding the images in the mind () is a
recipe for demonic interference.

chirping of birds, and the rising sun.122 Jones later discussed this vision with a
local nun, who declared that it was the first of five contemplations from the
Immeasurable Life Contemplation and urged Jones to continue his practice so
as to experience the remaining ones. Commenting on this interpretation, Jones
finds it curious that the nun would interpret an essentially spontaneous vision
in reference to a text that, in his words, prescribes a graduated program of
visualization (a text that, it should be noted, was not used during the retreat
itself). I would suggest, however, that this use of the Immeasurable Life Con-
templationas a handbook for the interpretation of visions rather than as a
manual for visualizationfully accords with the understanding found in
many if not most of the related fifth-century meditation texts, and shows just
how pervasive and long-lasting this approach to visionary meditation has
been in Chinese Buddhism.
reading others minds

As I have argued, the concept of visualization was developed within West-
ern thought in a particular polemical context, and from this context the word
acquired a number of potent associations that differentiate it from terms such
as imagination or hallucination. Though the use of the word visualiza-
tion in the description and analysis of Buddhist or other meditation practices
is not necessarily inappropriate as a result, it should be considered carefully. It
seems likely that at least some of the most important connotations of visuali-
zationsuch as its emphasis on the exclusively active agency of the subject,
and the notion of eidetic mental imagery that replicates the experience of
visual perception conceived of in photographic termsmay in the end tell us
more about nineteenth-century Western debates about religious experience
than about the way that Buddhists or anyone else traditionally understood the
nature and goals of meditative practice. The concerns of fifth-century Chinese
visionary meditation texts, at least, prove to be rather different than those
evoked by the concept of visualization, despite the tendency of scholars to
describe those practices in such terms.
It remains to be seen whether the concept of visualizationat least as I
have argued we must take itmight yet prove an accurate way of describing
other meditation practices within Buddhism or other religious traditions. But
what seems undeniably true is that choosing words like visualization to
describe Buddhist meditation practices had, and continues to have, its in-
tended effect. As I suggested, in the early twentieth century this word helped
122
Charles B. Jones, Buddha One: A One-Day Buddha-Recitation Retreat in Contemporary
Taiwan, in Approaching the Land of Bliss: Religious Praxis in the Cult of Amit
abha, ed. Richard K.
Payne and Kenneth K. Tanaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 276.

make these practices acceptable and even appealing in the West by framing
them as forms of positive psychological cultivation rather than passive trance.
The ability of visualization to make what might otherwise be dismissed as
hallucination, fantasy, or hypnotism seem interesting and worthwhile con-
tinues in the present day among those investigating the neuroscience of Bud-
dhist meditation. Here we find that some contemporary researchers have
become interested in exploring what Buddhist visualization practices, or at
least those individuals highly skilled in them, might contribute to our under-
standing of the nature and function of so-called mental imagery.123 There is a
certain irony here, as the concept of mental imagery implicitly invoked in
such discussions goes back to Francis Galton, from whom the notion of visu-
alization itself derives, as we have seen. One wonders whether the Buddhist
practices in question would seem relevant at all if the very vocabulary with
which they are routinely described in English did not already suggest that both
sides are talking about the same thing.
At times it is possible to spot the sleight of hand at work here. An illustra-
tive example can be seen in some remarks made by the Dalai Lama at a con-
ference held at MIT for the purpose of bringing together brain scientists and
Buddhist scholars and practitioners.124 In a panel on mental imagery, two
papers were given, one by experimental psychologist Stephen Kosslyn, a spe-
cialist in vision and mental imagery, and the other by the French-born Tibetan
Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, a regular participant in the experiments on
advanced meditators run by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin.
In the discussion that followed the two papers, the Dalai Lama, through his
translator, made the following unsolicited comment:
It is important to bear in mind the various contexts in which we use the term
imagery . . . [in meditation practice] through constant training and familiarity with
the image that you conceptualize, you can reach a very high level of clarity, such that
the content of that thought is referred to as a form, almost like a visible form. Unlike
ordinary material objects that are characterized by shape and color and so on, the con-
tent of that thought is not a material object, but it is nevertheless referred to as a men-
tal object that has a form. It is considered a constructed form . . . one can further
123
Although some researchers in the field have expressed considerable interest in visualization
meditation, empirical studies remain limited, and are vastly outnumbered by studies of other forms
of Buddhist meditation. According to Richard Davidson, this is largely because it has been difficult
for Western scientists to gain access to a sufficient number of subjects with the requisite training
(personal communication, April 6, 2012). For one recent study, whose scientific merits I am not in
a position to evaluate, see Maria Kozhevnikov et al., The Enhancement of Visuospatial Proces-
sing Efficiency through Buddhist Deity Meditation, Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (2009):
64553.
124
The papers and follow-up discussions were later published as Harrington and Zajonc, The
Dalai Lama at MIT.

develop ones meditative capacity to a very high level, where that form will take on a
qualitatively different nature. For example, if the object of the meditation is a fire, the
generated form can burn and one can use it like real fire.125
The Dalai Lama appears to be here invoking a traditional Buddhist explana-

tion according to which certain things seen during certain meditation practices
consist in a subtle form of matter (rupa) generated by the mind of the medita-
tor.126 Usually invisible to others, when the meditator is particularly advanced
this matter can gain in strength such that it interacts with the world.127
In other words the Dalai Lama is here explaining how visualization leads
to magical powers, powers that make sense in the Buddhist context precisely
because what a meditator visualizes in such cases is not in the mind but
out there already in the world.128 Based on the published transcripts, the Dalai
Lamas comments here did not provoke much discussion, and the panelists
quickly went back to talking about mental imagery. Although I cannot pre-
sume to know why the Dalai Lama chose to mention these things, we can see
here a brief moment when fundamentally different conceptions about the sub-
ject at hand came to the surface, a passing and quickly forgotten disturbance
in the attempt to frame certain traditional Buddhist practices in such a way
125
Ibid., 95.
126
These theories are discussed, among other places, in the Abhidharmako sabh aya. Pradhan,
Abhidharmako sabhayam, 197.56. See also *Ny ayanusara-sastra, T.1562:29.346b711. For
more discussion of this question, see Eric M. Greene, Seeing Avij~ napti-r
upa: Buddhist Doctrine
and Meditative Experience in India and China, in Buddhist Meditative Traditions: Comparison
and Dialog (Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing, forthcoming). Note that the Dalai Lamas meaning
here is obscured by the translators wording mental object that has a form, which as English sug-
gests an object that is ontologically mental rather than physical. Based on how these special medi-
tative objects are discussed in texts such as the Abhidharmako sabh aya, I suspect that form here
translates rupa (or its Tibetan equivalent), and that the meaning is rather an object of the mind (a
dharma) that is classified as r
upa.
127
That the things seen by the meditator are out there is also occasionally implied in the fifth-
century Chinese meditation texts discussed above. In the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation,
for example, the objects seen by the meditator are said to be composed of the four material elements
(T.613.15:245.b23), and are said to become visible to others under certain circumstances
(T.613:15.262a15; b16). Similarly, though the visions are sometimes dismissed as somehow unreal,
this is because they are dependently originated just as is the material body (T.613:15.246b911).
The basic understanding here also appears in medieval Chinese stories and miracle tales. See, for
example, the biography of Facong in Xu gao seng zhuan , T.2060:50.555c49.
128
This kind of understanding of what visionaries and meditators see can also be found in
medieval Christianity. As Mary Carruthers points out, when medieval Christian tales explain that
someone has seen something that those around him did not see, the point is usually not to indi-
cate, as we intuitively might do, that what was seen did not really exist or was entirely in his
mind. According to Carruthers, medieval European theories of memory assumed that mental
images were embodied and corporeal, and the fact that a vision seen by a single person was com-
posed of so-called mental images was often taken to affirm, not deny, the existence of the object in
question. See Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of
Images, 4001200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 18688.

that they do not appear too outlandish. We can see, moreover, the way that, in
this case at least, visualization cannot really serve as a simple description of
what Buddhists or Buddhist texts say meditators are or should be doing.
Rather, this word brings with it what Wayne Proudfoot calls a tacit explana-
tory commitment.129 Purporting to be serviceable as language that the people
whose culture we study might use to describe their own experiences (either
actual, or in the case of prescriptive meditation texts, ideal), visualization
ensures that what is so described already and necessarily conforms to our own
understanding of the relationship between the mind and the world.
Yale University
129
Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
236.


Vision and Visualization - Eric Greeen

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Eric M.

Greene VISIONS AND

2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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revealed. Though their newfound knowledge of classical Asian languages

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touches on questions of new literary conventions, the growth of image wor-

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of Purification (Visuddhimagga), the most important source where the kasia

For Eliade, then, visualization is quite different from ordinary imagination; as

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sive imagination. As we unpack the history of the Western concept of visu-

toward a history of visualization

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1873, speaking on the nature of light, he writes: To realize this subsensible

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from galton to theosophy to buddhism

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in fact, simply well-developed visualizations.41 Naturalistic accounts of

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as discussed above, it is implicit in the approach of those nineteenth-century

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groups, using techniques modeled on those popularized by Friedrich Anton

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Criticism of trance centered on mediums lack of personal agency and their

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to Theosophy,66 and whose four early books on Tibetan Buddhism he charac-

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changing perceptions of buddhist meditation

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rituals.73 Earlier scholars, in contrast, had described the kasia meditations

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Buddhist meditation went from being a passive, trancelike state to something

visionary meditation in fifth-century chinese buddhism

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Immeasurable Life Contemplation, a text that, in the reading favored by

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the sun contemplation

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increasing detail. The sun contemplation itself is comparatively straightfor-

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meditative visions in the secret essential

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This remarkable vision then is characterized as the first jingjie of the

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organ.107 But in the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation, as well as in

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Although there is no mention of anything that we would even be tempted to

The appearance of confirmatory visions here is thus in no way predicated on

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