Visions of Sublime Excess: Visionary Literature, Expansive Art, and Transformative Technologies in Ancient and Modern Buddhism

Abstract

This essay traces certain threads of the “Buddhist sublime,” from its articulation in Mahāyāna Buddhist literature to contemporary interpretations of interdependence. It first examines the visionary exuberance of the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra, whose lavish passages produce imagery designed overwhelm ordinary conceptual understanding and visualization capacity by collapsing temporal and spatial boundaries. This ancient vision of the sublime gets incorporated into modern Buddhist thought, mediating the tensions between Romantic visions of an interconnected, meaning-saturated universe and scientific accounts of an immense, indifferent cosmos. Contemporary interpretations of Indra’s Net and Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing attempt to infuse a sense of the Buddhist sublime into secular understandings of the cosmos. These contemporary visions offer both consolation amid technological and existential disorientation and an ethical imperative to address systemic suffering and ecological crisis.