Many of the visionary episodes provided her [Kennett Roshi] with an experience of, or an
insight into, her past lives ...Each successive vision – of such things as giant lotus blossoms,
towers, columns of light, fountains, heavenly Buddha Lands, Buddhas and
lineage-Patriarchs – superimposed itself onto her immediate physical surroundings.
She observed, moved, acted and interacted within the context of each
unfolding vision – by climbing glass mountains, for example, or by travelling to
different realms and conversing with celestial beings – but she remained awake
and alert throughout, constantly ‘aware of things going on around me’
(Kennett 1977b: 263).
...
In particular, she experienced an awesome and holy being whom she variously described as ‘the
Cosmic Buddha’, ‘the Lord of the House’ or simply ‘the Lord’, and to whom she
related in a deeply reverential, penitential, humble, obedient and prayerful
way. At other times, however, her presentation was ambivalent about the
ontological status of the places and beings in her visions that, she explained,
were themselves ‘empty’ or merely symbolic expressions of Buddhahood. This
ambivalence is observed by both Rawlinson and Batchelor who describe
Kennett’s Zen as ‘theistic’ or ‘quasi-theistic’ whilst acknowledging that she
upholds ‘basic Buddhist teachings’ (Rawlinson 1997: 368) – like anatta (noself)
and sunyata (emptiness) – and that the Christian associations are
therefore ‘more apparent than real’ (Batchelor 1994: 136). Kennett’s experience,
then, may best be understood as a combination of the numinous and the
mystical.
In the years following her kensho, Kennett herself drew a distinction between
‘imaginative visions’ and ‘intellectual visions’, and this helps us to understand
... According to Kennett’s typology, however, both imaginative and intellectual visions are
understood as numinous experiences. Thus, even in an intellectual vision
a person knows for certain that there is something greater than himself
with him (or her). I have often had monks say to me: ‘I can feel the
Lord of the House here. I know He is sitting with me. I haven’t seen
Him – I just know’.
[In her diary, How to Grow a Lotus Blossum] Kennett next experiences a number of her past lives (see Figure 6.1) so that
she can ‘clean the impregnations that the karma of my past lives has left upon
my skhandas [sic]’. Cleaning or ‘converting’ inherited karmic propensities is a
prerequisite to becoming ‘one with the Eternal Lord’. The past-life images that
flash before her here are also seen by her assistant disciple:
He looks at me and for a fleeting moment sees a very old European
Christian monk; he is very happy, he has left behind no unclean
impregnations […] Further and further back I go […] Down the
centuries I have been a monk so many times; fifteen times Christian,
fourteen Buddhist, sometimes male, sometimes female.
(Kennett 1977b: 51–53)
Once her karma on the human plane of existence is dealt with, she goes on to
purify ‘the karma from lives in the formless realms and from animal lives’. At
this point she undergoes a key past-life experience, that of ‘a white tiger,
captured whilst eating a heron, by a tribe of Indians whose religious cult was
one of tiger worship’ (Kennett 1977b: 66). ...
Having cleansed the karma of her past lives, Kennett finds herself in ‘the
Buddha Land’ where she is ‘seated in a lotus blossom’ within an immense sea ‘full
of lotus blossoms just like mine’, each representing the ‘flowering’ of Buddhist
training. In a particularly striking vision, she witnesses Shakyamuni Buddha
become absorbed into the great, golden Cosmic Buddha that I now see
in the sky. He is taken into the Cosmic Buddha and yet is separate
from Him. He is not the Cosmic Buddha but there is nothing in him
that is not of the Cosmic Buddha; the two are inseparable and
different.
(Kennett 1977b: 93–94)
http://elibrary.ibc.ac.th/files/priv...Adaptation.pdf