Visions, Dreams, and Meditations in Buddhism

Visionary experiences - meditation, dreams, and deathbed visions - hold a central place in Buddhist traditions, and have gone on to inspire modern practices such as mindfulness and lucid dreaming. Many forms of Buddhist visionary experience are thought to involve conscious and voluntary visualizations, in contrast to spontaneous and passive visions. Through readings about visionary aspects of meditation, dreams, and deathbed visions in classical Buddhist literature (in translation) in a pan-Buddhist context, we will reflect upon the following questions: Do the modern ideas of Buddhist visualization practices truthfully represent early Buddhist understanding? What do these visionary experiences reveal about Buddhist epistemologies and soteriologies? Undergraduates register for 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.