The Pure Land revisited: Sino-Japanese meditations and near-death experiences of the next world.

Abstract

This article reviews the objects and techniques of Buddhist meditation used to obtain visions of the Pure Land (or "next world"), and considers the Buddhist response to criticisms of such meditative visions of the Pure Land; examines the theory and philosophy of deathbed visions as presented within Buddhism, adducing Japanese deathbed visions from the historical literature; and places these visions within the context of the Buddhist world-view to show how the Buddhists made consistent sense of their experiences.It is found that deathbed imagery is indigenous and integral to Pure Land Buddhism; that ancient Japanese Buddhist meditative and deathbed visions closely parallel modern American near-death and deathbed visions; and that the Buddhist philosophy of idealism provides a coherent model of a "next world" capable of integrating and interpreting these experiences.better-known cases of the many monks to have done so, and I shall also note numerous histories, both in China and Japan, of non-Anabiosis -The Journal for Near-Death Studies, Spring 1984, Vol. 4, No. 1 Anabiosis-The Journal for Near-Death Studies meditating laymen who had similar visions on their deathbeds.These observations need not contradict my previous study.In my previous article, I pointed out that the origins of each transmission of the Pure Land faith to China were traceable to people who had near-death experiences while largely unaware of the Pure Land tradition, and who embraced Pure Land Buddhism because it made such good explanatory sense of their life-changing experiences.This article, however, is to show rather that once the religion was established, it set up regular procedures for observing deathbeds

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