Visualization Practices in the Flower Garland Sutra

‘The Flower Garland Sutra contains many, many passages that reveal visions of infinite worlds, beings, life, space, light, and time — all of which, according to Cleary, in his introduction to the “Entry into the Realm of Reality,” can be understood as material or occasions for practicing meditative visualization.

An example of this [visualization] practice is made explicit in a short scripture of the Flower Ornament corpus, called “Section on Cultivation of Love from the Flower Ornament Scripture.” Part of the visualization involves imagining every particle of one’s own body as a buddha-land, replete with such adornments as are described at great length throughout the scripture; then one visualizes all the beings in the universe entering into those buddha-lands within oneself and consciously evokes thoughts of love and wishes of well-being for them all. Another visualization practice, as evidenced in Chinese records, focuses on the lights emanated by buddhas in various scenes of the scripture.