A Buddhist Sun Miracle?
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In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn’t see it. Catholics continue to bring this up as one of the best-attested miracles and strongest empirical proofs of the faith - including here on Substack, where there was a spirited debate about the event last fall.
I did my best to research the event, and the results were The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know and Highlights From The Comments On Fatima. The main thing I was able to add to the Substack discussion, if not the broader worldwide one, was a survey of similar events. There were apparent sun miracles at various other Catholic sites and apparitions of the Virgin, including a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Italy, and a small town in Bosnia where they seem to happen regularly. But also, people who “sungaze” - a weird alternative medicine practice where people stare at the sun in the hopes that maybe this will help something and they won’t go blind - report sometimes seeing the sun spin and change color in similar ways. And Buddhist meditators report that concentrating very hard on any bright light will cause similar things to happen.
Still, the Catholics - especially original Fatima-Substacker Ethan Muse - were not convinced. The other Catholic sightings could have been other real miracles, equally attributable to the Virgin. The sungazers were staring at the sun for a long time, unlike the Fatima pilgrims who just happened to glance up at it. And the Buddhists were doing complicated meditation techniques, again different from the Fatima pilgrims who just looked up and saw it. These were suggestive, but there was no record of a miracle exactly like Fatima happening within a non-Catholic religious tradition.
Until now! Substacker Arthur T, building on research from Sophia In The Shell, has found a 1990s Buddhist sun miracle very similar to Fatima.
The setting is the Dhammakaya Temple, a culty Buddhist megachurch in Bangkok.
On September 6 1998, a crowd of 20,000 gathered for a ceremony. Someone cried out that they saw a vision of the sect’s founder, Luang Pu Sodh, in the sky, with the sun at his heart. The crowd turned and focused on the sun. Here are some reports:
“The sun I saw at that moment radiated colors unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life. The colors shifted as if the sun was moving back and forth. There was a pinkish glow all around, then it changed to blue, then to a purplish-indigo color. And then, it looked like the entire image of Luang Pho Sod, in golden color, in the sky. It was as if the sun was a crystal ball inside his stomach. The sun’s light shifted again and again. I was so happy. I turned to the people next to me and said, ‘Look at the sun! Look at the sun with me!’ Many people who saw it stood and watched, waving flags. I was moved to tears… I’m a science student, and you can’t truly understand something like this unless you experience it yourself…”.
And:
The sun rotated around itself, and lights flickered around the sphere quite frequently. Pink light radiated outwards over a wide area around the sun, creating a beautiful sight. The colors changed constantly to gold, blue, and orange, unlike the sun halos we usually see. Suddenly, an image of Luang Por Sod of Wat Pak Nam Phasi Charoen, in a meditative posture, appeared as a golden statue in the sky above the Maha Dhammakaya Chedi. A sphere resembling the sun rotated around the center of his abdomen, and a very large, transparent crystal ball surrounded the image of Luang Por. At the same time, the images of hundreds of monks meditating around the Dhammakaya Chedi changed to a beautiful pink color. After about 20 minutes, everything returned to normal. The sun, which had been pleasantly and comfortably visible to the naked eye just moments before, became blindingly bright and unbearable, forcing us to avert our gaze as usual, even though the atmosphere had cooled down and the sun was about to set.
Compare to some of the Catholic testimonials from Fatima, like this one:
The hour approaches, and behold, as if by magic, the rain stops, the sun breaks through the dense, black clouds and reveals itself with its luminous rays, which quickly take on the colors of yellow, red, and green, turning the objects that were under its influence the same colors; and soon loses its brightness and colors—able to be seen with the naked eye without hurting the eyes—and takes on a dizzying rotation, seeming to fall toward the earth. And while observing these wonders, all the people are in loud exclamations. This lasted, at most, about five minutes, then returned to its normal state.
Or this one:
The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon and being easily seen. Three times during this period [it] manifested a rotational movement on its periphery, flashing sparks of light on its edges, similar to what happens with the well-known firework wheels. This rotational movement of the sun’s edges, manifested 3 times and 3 times interrupted, was rapid and lasted 8 or 10 minutes, more or less. The sun took on a violet color and then an orange, spreading these colors over the earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor.
It’s really similar!
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.
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.
Claude tightens the link further:
Scholars have actually classified the Dhammakaya [practice of meditating on a vision of a crystal ball at one’s heart] as a form of āloka kasina (bright light kasina). A UK survey found that kasina practitioners form about 3–15% of total meditators — 3% for kasina alone, but 15% if those practicing the āloka kasina practice of Dhammakaya meditation are included. Fandom So from an outside scholarly perspective, what they’re doing is arguably already a type of kasina practice — just not fire kasina, and not one they’d describe in those terms themselves.
So they’re doing a sort of off-brand kasina meditation in an emotionally charged crowd, and then they see the Fatima miracle. Hmmmm.
Arthur says his research has been slowed by his inability to understand Thai, and asks if any Thai-speaking sleuths are willing to take the case:
[First, I would] love to see contemporary newspaper accounts, especially skeptical/mocking ones analogous to the anticlerical Portuguese press from 1917. Apparently this was all over Thai media at the time, but I haven’t found any of the original coverage yet.
[Second], I’m very curious if anyone reported anything at all similar to “miraculous drying,” because that’s the only aspect of Fatima I haven’t seen paralleled here yet.
[Third], Apparently, the miracle happened on at least a few occasions in late summer-fall 1998. I wonder if it still happens. Sometimes pilgrims “take home” the miracle from Medjugorje. Does the same happen here?
But most of all, just more testimonies. Since I wrote up this post, I’ve found a Facebook thread from six years ago and a forum thread from twenty years ago with a number of people who saw it firsthand describing their experiences. So at this stage I feel pretty confident it was “real” insofar as “a real mass event” and not some kind of weirdly elaborate long-con hoax to fuck with western Fatima enthusiasts. But I would love to be put in touch with any witness willing to talk about it in detail. I have been poking around on Dhammakaya Facebook groups a little, but no luck so far.
If you have any extra information, you can contact him here.