What roles do intentional cultivation and implicit cultural conditioning play in shaping experience? Is everything that is imagined necessarily imaginary? Is all experience imagined in some sense? 

This week will introduce several important contemporary theories about role of the imagination in religious experience, from the anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann (When God talks Back), religious studies scholar, Jeffrey Kripal (Comparing Religions), and transpersonal theorist, Jorge Ferrer (Participation and the Mystery). Our inquiry will focus on how the imagination functions in both cultivated and spontaneous religious experiences.

This week introduces classical Indian theories about the imagination at work in Vedic religion (Laurie Patton, Bringing the Gods to Mind) and Indian poetic theory (David Shulman, More than Real), as well as Buddhist theories about the relation of mind, action, and world (selections from Pali suttas and Vasubandhu).

Building on our previous inquiry into the role of intentional cultivation of the imagination and culture in shaping experience, this week’s inquiry will focus on the role of religious and poetic language, as well as ritual and moral action in the creation of a world (loka). We will also take a brief look at some of the terms for the imagination in Sanskrit.

With some contemporary and classical theory under our belt, this week takes a closer look at visionary episodes in the Pali suttas, uses of images in contemporary Theravāda forms of meditation and cultivation (bhāvanā) of the path, and the concept of the divine eye (image centered psychic insight). 

Our key focus will be how images are used in the cultivation of the Buddhist path, and how we can reconcile this with the idea that suffering is caused by imagining things that are unreal (self) or imagining things that are real to be different than they are (stable, permanent). We will also inquire into how persons with aphantasia (lack of ability to visualize mental images) can use the imagination in the cultivation of the path.

This week looks at how images and narratives are deployed in Mahāyāna sūtras to help shift the hearer’s perspective, as well as at how visionary experiences and image orientated meditation practices may have played a role in the development of some Mahāyāna sūtras. We will focus in particular on the Lotus, Flower Ornament, and Land of Bliss sūtras.  

Some of our key questions will be: What’s with all the jeweled trees in the pure land? How does the intentional cultivation of the imagination relate to spontaneous visionary experience? What difference does an image make to the transmission of a philosophical concept?

This week we will look at the imagination in Tibetan Buddhism, how it is used in common preliminary ritual practices (ngöndro), and in multi-layered pilgrimage practices, in which the landscape is transformed by the attentive pilgrim’s imagination, and transforms the pilgrim in return. We will also look at the role of the cultural imagination in shaping near death experiences and accounts after life journeys.

This week brings it all back home. Given the temporal and/or cultural gap between traditional Buddhism and the modern world, how can modern Buddhist practitioners inhabit richly imagined traditional Buddhist worlds or otherwise draw on the transformative power of the imagination in ways that feel authentic? How, in particular, can they relate to traditional Buddhist cosmologies, or use the imagination to bring about a better world? These questions will give us the opportunity to draw on theories of the imagination introduced in weeks one and two and developed throughout the course.