Visuality in Esoteric Buddhism – Awakened with a Single Glance?

In the year 806 CE the Japanese monk Kūkai returned from a journey to China and brought a large amount of visual artefacts with him. Commentators have wondered since what role these visual media play in Kūkai’s Buddhist thought. It has been speculated that the art works show that Kūkai values visual media higher when it comes to transmitting the teaching of the Buddha. Proponents of this view usually refer to a single passage from Kūkai’s writings to warrant their interpretation. By analysing the respective passage in detail and showing how it connects to Kūkai’s other writings, this article argues that Kūkai did not prefer the visual to the verbal in transmitting the dharma. Mandalas certainly play an important role in Kūkai’s thought, but their role differs from what these modern interpreters suppose: first, when Kūkai speaks about ‘mandalas’ he often does not refer to paintings, but to the structure of reality or to ritual procedures. Second, mandala paintings have an ambiguous role in esoteric ritual, because they were added rather late in the development of esoteric ritual. For Kūkai they serve primarily as storyboards for ritual performance. Third, the first glance at a mandala is an important moment during esoteric initiations, but it is only the beginning of a rigorous training. Moreover, the crucial moment in esoteric ritual is the union of the practitioner with the deity; glancing at the mandala has no role to play in this mystic union. Fourth, mandala paintings can be used, according to Kūkai, to reveal the deeper structure of texts, but in this role they are not superior to the written medium but rather play a helping role. Fifth, Kūkai believes that texts as well as paintings can be misleading whenever they are taken as representations of a rigid structure of reality. In Kūkai’s eyes, the visual cannot, therefore, solve the problem how the Buddha can transmit his dharma.

Khomeini the Poet Mystic

Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989), the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is commonly known in the West for his political reading of Islam. Especially his death-sentence against the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, in 1989, strengthened his image as a fundamentalist. Khomeini as a hermit and mystic poet who composed poetry about selfless love, wine and mystic union is, for the western public, contradictio in terminis. Yet mysticism and poetry are two essential aspects of his personality, usually overshadowed by his outspoken political views.

The Possibility of Theistic Experience

In a recent issue of Religious Studies Kevin Corcoran has criticized my arguments for the impossibility of theistic experience (i.e. an experience which is phenomenologically of God). Building on, and amending, criticisms already levelled against my views by Nelson Pike (in the latter's Mystic Union), Corcoran argues that my views are based on an account of what it is for an experience to be ‘phenomenologically of’ an individual (or kind of thing) which leads to ‘wildly implausible’ results. I here try to show that Corcoran's criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of my views.

Pike's Mystic Union and the Possibility of Theistic Experience

In his long-awaited Mystic Union, Nelson Pike offers a phenomenology of mysticism. His account is based on the reports and descriptions of third parties, not on his own, first-person experience. So he calls his enterprise ‘phenomenography’, an attempt to describe the experiential content of conscious states by way of reports of them. Pike finds in the Christian mystical tradition three different kinds of experiences of mystic union, the ‘prayer of quiet’, the ‘prayer of union’ and ‘rapture’. These experiences differ phenomenologically, i.e. in experiential content. But they are all ‘theistic’ experiences; that is, they are all phenomenologically of God. By this Pike means: (a) whether these experiences are veridical or not, their object – what they are veridical or hallucinatory experiences of – is God; and (b) that they are of God is part of, or given in, the phenomenological content of the experiences themselves.