Look, William Blake bore witness to a flock of angels in an oak tree at Peckham Rye. Moses heard God speak from inside a burning bush (the bush burned but was not consumed and this is how we can be sure it was a God-infused bush). The angel Gabriel revealed themselves (it feels foolish to gender species like angels) to both Mary and Muhammad, bringing new information that would transform not just their own individual futures, but also the future of humanity. Muhammad, so it goes, was more reluctant to believe his vision was legitimate than Mary: “Woe is me—poet or possessed!” he cried out to his wife afterwards. And Asanga, a fourth-century monk and one of the most significant figures of Mahayana Buddhism, one of the religion’s three main branches, was desperate to receive a particular vision: a meditative encounter with Maitreya, a bodhisattva (heroic figures on the path towards Buddhahood, who choose to function as guides towards enlightenment for those of us on Earth). After five years immersed in study of the sutras, Asanga was no closer to discovering any mysteries of the cosmos. He decided that meeting Maitreya through meditation would awaken him to the truth about reality, dharma, and so catalyze his own enlightenment. 

For twelve years, Asanga meditated alone in a cave but saw no flicker of radiant wings, no sunbursts appearing from another realm like a cigarette burning through cloth, no ripple of celestial Vaseline-sheen over the surface of things, not even the quickest shiver of transcendental feeling. At last, Asanga left the cave and came across a dying dog on the road, whose sores were infested with maggots. Concerned both for the maggots’ safety and the dog’s survival, he carved off a piece of his own leg to feed the dog and gently picked the maggots out of its putrefying flesh with his own tongue; he was worried he might crush the maggots if he used his hands. And in that disgusting gesture, dog and maggots vanished and there was Maitreya before him. He could only access such a profound vision, finally, as a result of his degrading and eminently compassionate act towards beast and larvae. 

What I am saying is this: strange visions need strange eyes. William Blake probably came out of the womb with all the requisite gear, including visionary lenses, to perceive strangeness. He understood the incalculable value of singular perspective: “To generalize is to be an idiot; to particularize is the alone distinction of merit,” he declared. “All sublimity is founded on minute discrimination.” My guess is that Asanga was not born that way; he had to cultivate his strange sight through undistracted, uncorrupted time alone staring at cave walls. 

We must protect those able to discern the beautiful strangeness of the world. We need them to point us towards sublimity. Without such people, we are destined to fritter our world away, turning the future into a blancmange of meaningless accumulation. Social media is not a good medium for strangeness, for example, not when it requires us to blurt out the quickest, noisiest, most palatable thing we can express in order to get anyone’s attention. The very idea of “doing it for the algorithm” is an act against oddity, an assault against individuality. 

It’s only recently that I have become friendly with my own strangeness again. I come from a strange family. It’s only getting stranger. As a child I had visions, talked to inanimate objects, made up psychonautical stories that I thought of not as fiction but the creation of new realities. All this was tempered once I became a teenager and thus desperate, like most teenagers, to be cool, meaning unremarkable. I’m relieved to be out of that stage and delighted that the people I call my closest friends these days are such an eclectic, eccentric, romantic bunch of weirdos. I’m delighted, too, that my job the last few years pretty much boils down to getting to speak to people about their one-of-a-kind visions of life. 

Sometimes, these days, I can feel it in an instant: when the person before me has the kind of eyes through which I would love to see—as much as that is ever possible, with a kind of Kierkegaardian imaginative leap. They’ll offer something on a subject about which I thought I had already made up my mind. And what they say will feel so new or surprising to me that it immediately reorients my relationship with the thing described. That’s what happened with Saccamani. I met them at a friend’s dinner party. They’re an ordained Buddhist priest with lots of tats and short electric blue hair. Both times I’ve met them they’ve worn pale lilac dungarees. We only spoke for a moment that evening, but it was enough to be certain that I wanted to speak to them again about their way of seeing. A couple of weeks later, I texted asking if I could come visit them at the London Buddhist Centre where they once lived and still work. 

The London Buddhist Centre (LBC) is on Roman Road in Bethnal Green, east London, one of the most stubbornly undead, un-soulless regions of the city. In Bethnal Green there are always people out on the streets, and they’re actually talking to each other. There are mosques and churches rubbing shoulders, and then there’s the LBC. It’s a typical redbrick Victorian building, a fire station before it was taken over in the 1970s by the London Buddhists. I spend an above-average amount of time in holy houses staring up at the decadent trappings of religion, but I was still blown away by the twice-life-size, gold-skinned Buddhas on the altars in the meditation spaces, serene but stacked, worlds away from emaciated Christs on crosses. I like to imagine them together, Buddhas and Christs, how they’d get along. 

We spoke in the LBC’s enclosed front garden, right next to a large pyramidal fountain whose rushing waters partly disguised all the honking and yelling and singing going on behind the garden wall. Periodically, droplets of water would leap out from the fountain and land in my notebook, turning my words into Rorschach tests. 

• • •

Saccamani is the kind of person who slows you right down. They have a gentle manner, speak unhurriedly and carefully. They got their new name, which means “one who is a jewel of truth,” at their ordination ceremony two years ago. They told me it was scary to receive a new name. “I didn’t know who I was anymore, but I also trusted it.” 

They’d brought with them a page from the Sutra of Golden Light, a text originally in Sanskrit from the Mahayana branch of Buddhism, which they read aloud to me. In the extract, a bodhisattva falls asleep at which point he has a vision of a golden drum, which “glowed in ten directions.” “I saw Buddhas everywhere,” the dreamer tells us. “They were sitting on jeweled trees and on beryl seats at the head of an assembly of numerous hundreds of thousands.” At the risk of sounding like a numerologist, if Christianity is all threes and ones, Buddhism is a faith that has a special relationship with the figure of infinity: there are Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future, Buddhas who live in other realms called buddha-fields. In the Sutra of Golden Light, it is from within the prosaic drumbeats themselves that the bodhisattva discerns the prayer he will spend the rest of the sutra recounting. This includes the story of ten thousand devas, celestial beings who exist somewhere between humanity and godhood, who receive the prophecy that someday they will become Buddhas. It includes the story of a prince who gives his body to a starving tigress and her cubs in a forest. “Now the time has come for me to give this body away,” he says, with all his supreme, impossible compassion. “This body has no purpose save to abandon its unknown nature.”

While Saccamani read from the sutra in the walled garden (it is recommended you read it aloud, communally), I felt the same kind of fizzy lightness come over me that I would get whenever my mother read fantasy novels to me as a child. In the Sutra of Golden Light there is an almost delirious abundance of imaginative complexity and heroic, otherworldly selflessness at play. Saccamani told me that they love it for its animistic qualities: if you might hear from within the simple beating of a drum a vast prayer dense with narrative meaning, then maybe it follows that every single thing around us—the fountain with its flying beads of water, the branches of a tree at Peckham Rye—might be ripe to tell us (if only we’d listen) strange and beautiful new things. 

• • •

I wanted to know how Saccamani hones their visions, how they learn to hear the language within the drumming, the stillness beneath all that noise on Roman Road. They trained as an artist before they became a Buddhist, and I think that’s part of it, a way to tune your idiosyncratic perceptions on the world. But Buddhism offered them a more considered and engaged route into mystical sight. When you’re ordained, they told me, you’re given a yidam, a tutelary deity towards whom you will then focus upon in all your meditations. Yidams are manifestations of Buddhahood. Focusing on your yidam during meditation is a way to connect to the enlightened mind—perhaps, I thought, like how a lover is really a way to tap into that eternal and universal feeling that gets called love.

Before their ordination ceremony, Saccamani had been convinced they wanted Padmasambhava, a fierce and wrathful deity, as their yidam. It’s hard to overstate the significance of one’s choice of yidam. You will spend every day of the rest of your life contemplating this deity in your meditations. In the end, one of their teachers suggested they choose White Tara instead. And that’s worked out well. “I kind of fell in love with her,” they told me. 

Tara is a female Buddha. There are many forms of Tara (Green Tara, Red Tara, Blue Tara, White Tara) and several Tara origin stories. The one Saccamani told me comes from Tibetan Buddhism. One day Avalokiteśvara, the god who looks down at the world, felt such deep compassion for us far beneath him that he shed a single tear. It fell to the ground and formed a lake, where a lotus grew, and when the flower opened, there was Tara. As such, Tara is a symbol of compassion. White Tara in particular is thought to have a gentle, sensitive character. She is connected to healing and to the moon. “The moon is Tara; Tara is the moon,” Saccamani told me. “I don’t know if I can explain.” They didn’t need to explain. It all felt so beyond my understanding and that was welcome.   

Their meditations on White Tara, too, are not something that can be understood intellectually, but can be experienced only through practice—not that this is always easy. White Tara comes and goes like fog from inside Saccamani’s visions.  

First you try to visualize a blue sky. The blue sky stands for emptiness, the achievement of emptiness in your mind’s eye. Then a pale lotus slides out from the blue into the foreground of your vision. From its petals springs White Tara. Cross-legged, seven-eyed, a garlanded and bejeweled deity in a female form. You stare across at her until you feel the borders between yourself and White Tara start to melt. You become less yourself and more White Tara. At some point, you actually become White Tara. Now she stares across at herself. 

Through White Tara’s eyes, Saccamani sees things as they truly are. With her seven eyes, White Tara sees all the realms of reality at once, perceives the whole vast matrix of cosmic complexity. The goal is that one day, after many years of meditation, you travel all the way across from yourself to your yidam and don’t come back. In any case, there would be no old self to return to. I said that sounded scary and they told me it is. But there was no trace of fear I could detect in their voice. 

The idea that all of us has the capacity—through harnessing our compassion, our attention, by way of literature or meditation—to see with strange eyes, that there are all these ways by which we might save ourselves from being chained to one narrow mode of perception for the rest of our lives, is totally thrilling. To accept new perspectives across the borders of ourselves inevitably changes the person we thought we were. That might sound scary, but, as angels have so often said to humans, you do not need to be afraid.