Astral Codex Ten

Buddha

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Buddha

Article

Buddha is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 23, 2021 and March 27, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I also hallucinated a Buddha with a finger up each nostril”; “The Buddhist term “Buddha” means “awakened one””; “visualize a Buddha with a crystal sphere in his belly”. It most often appears alongside Buddhist, Against Automaticity, Arthur.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 23, 2021
  • Last seen: March 27, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True
April 23, 2021 · Original source
After all, during that retreat, I also hallucinated a Buddha with a finger up each nostril, the most beautifully bewhiskered otter I had ever seen, and a pile of loose teeth.
Inline links: hallucinated
Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually
August 31, 2023 · Original source
But dig deeper and this is part of every traditional description of the human condition. Plato spoke about the conflict between our rational, emotional, and appetitive souls, and that in some people the rational soul fails at its duty to run the show. The Buddhist term “Buddha” means “awakened one”, in contrast to everyone else who was not fully awake; the slightest experience with meditation is enough to demonstrate that “mindfulness” is interesting precisely because of how mindless our actions usually are.
These questions, taken seriously, will drive you insane. Plato and the Buddha are old enough to be safe, but this is prime cult recruitment material here. Tell people (as Gurdjieff did) that they are sheep-like automata drifting through life without conscious thought, and they’ll notice it’s basically true, freak out, and become easy prey for whatever grift you promise will right the situation.
Does that make us, as Banana warns, “infinitely vulnerable to our environment”? An enlightened Buddha would answer by denying the self/environment distinction. On this side of samsara, I would answer by denying the premise: just because we’re automata, doesn’t mean we have to be bad automata. No human roboticist would design a robot that lost half its horsepower whenever it heard a word relating to elderly people, and evolution didn’t design us that way either. Overall we’re pretty robust to a broad range of environmental perturbations. And one of the ways we’re robust is that when we notice red flags that people are trying to fool us, we switch out of our usual automaton mode and consider the situation carefully.
Inline links: switch out of our usual automaton mode
A Buddhist Sun Miracle?
March 27, 2026 · Original source
The biggest difference is that many of the Buddhists report seeing an image of the monk Luang Pu Sodh in the sky. One commenter mentions that the crowd had just been meditating, and that a typical Dhammakaya meditation practice is to visualize a Buddha with a crystal sphere in his belly; if true, this would be relevant to them seeing a vision of a monk with a crystal sun in his belly. The “miracle” seems to be a combination of everyone seeing this at once, and the sun behaving in a way not predictable by the specifics of Dhammakaya meditation, but seemingly very predictable by the specifics of its behavior at Fatima almost a century earlier.
Inline links: One commenter mentions
The Buddha-with-glowing-sphere-in-his-belly motif of the Dhammakaya movement, source here. This replication of Fatima in an “uncontaminated” context pushes me further towards believing that sun miracles are neither true divine intervention nor vague hypnotic suggestion, but some particular illusory/psychological phenomenon which necessarily manifests as the sun spinning and changing color, and which can occur independently even among people who aren’t primed to expect it. I continue to be vague on specifics, but think it might be somehow related to fire kasina meditation. This comes from a different Buddhist tradition than the one the Thais were doing; as far as I can tell, none of the Dhammakaya practitioners made the connection. But it seems like being in a meditative frame of mind helped. And it seems like the same pattern of fire kasina effects - including spinning lights, shifting colors swatches, and vivid hallucinations - applied here too.
Inline links: here, somehow related to fire kasina meditation