The small number of Buddhist-identified respondents brought a contemplative vocabulary that located the archive's common experiences within a non-theistic framework.
The Hardy Archive contains 15 accounts from people who described their experiences through Buddhist frameworks, a small number that reflects the demographics of mid-twentieth-century Britain more than any feature of the experiences themselves. What these accounts do, despite their small number, is introduce a notably different vocabulary: one in which the subject of the experience is not encountering a transcendent other but is recognizing the nature of what was always the case. The language shifts from presence and meeting to seeing-through, dissolution, and return.
If your experience was framed through Buddhist practice or concepts, you may find the archive's Buddhist accounts useful precisely because they show what the same underlying phenomena sound like in a non-theistic vocabulary. Where Christian accounts speak of presence and grace, the Buddhist-framed accounts speak of the dropping-away of the sense of a separate self, a recognition of what is already here, a clarity that arrived when the usual preoccupations fell still. These descriptions are not psychologically incoherent with the Christian ones; they appear to be describing an overlapping set of events in genuinely different terms.
The 15 accounts are too few to draw strong statistical conclusions, but they are consistent enough in certain features to be suggestive. Several describe the experience as arising in or near formal practice, though not always at the moments of practice themselves, a familiar observation in the contemplative literature that the cultivation of attention in practice opens something that then arises in ordinary life. If you have had experiences in a Buddhist context, the archive offers some confirmation that what happened to you has been documented, even if only in small numbers in this particular collection.
Buddhist-tradition respondents represent only 0.7% of the archive's identified accounts, fifteen people, but their accounts are phenomenologically rich and offer a particularly useful interpretive contrast to the Christian majority. Buddhism, unlike Christianity, provides an elaborate phenomenological taxonomy of meditative and contemplative states that gives practitioners who reach threshold experiences a precise and pre-existing vocabulary for what they have encountered. What is striking in the archive's Buddhist accounts is both the familiarity of the experiences described (they overlap substantially with what Christian and secular respondents describe) and the interpretive framework applied to them: experiences that a Christian might call encounter with God are described by Buddhist respondents as the dissolution of the separate self, the recognition of emptiness, or the arising of the awakening mind.
The non-theistic character of Buddhist interpretation is of particular theoretical interest. Many of the archive's most deeply transformative experiences, the dissolution of self-boundaries, the perception of underlying unity, the ineffable quality of something known to be real, do not, in Buddhist accounts, require a personal divine agent as their cause or object. The experience is real; what it reveals is interpreted through a lens that questions the substantial existence of any permanent self. This interpretive framework does not reduce the experience's reported intensity or durability; the lasting effects reported by Buddhist-background respondents match the archive's broader patterns closely.
Buddhist accounts in the archive are textually distinctive in their vocabulary and their relationship to effort. Where Christian accounts often emphasize the unearned quality of grace, the experience arriving as gift, Buddhist accounts are more likely to describe extended practice, with the experience arriving through practice rather than despite it, while still insisting that the final breakthrough was not an achievement of will. Technical Buddhist terminology appears, often with self-conscious translation offered alongside: 'what the tradition calls anatta, or no-self,' 'the state the texts describe as samadhi.' A secondary signature is philosophical restraint: Buddhist accounts tend to resist metaphysical claims about what the experience proves, focusing instead on phenomenological description and the transformation in how the experiencer subsequently relates to their own mind.
At fifteen accounts (0.7%), the Buddhist group is too small for confident statistical generalization, but it is not trivial: it represents practitioners who found Hardy's appeal relevant to their experience. The accounts suggest significant cross-traditional phenomenological convergence, the experiences described overlap substantially with Christian and secular accounts, while the interpretive frameworks are genuinely different. This convergence alongside interpretive difference is one of the central questions in the academic study of religious experience, and the Buddhist accounts contribute usefully to it.
This is not the same as deep samadhi.
Samadhi, concentrated absorption states, is a specific category of contemplative experience in Buddhist and Hindu frameworks, and it is not identical with the kinds of experiences Hardy documented. Samadhi produces specific phenomenological states within formal practice: bliss, stillness, one-pointedness. What the archive describes is more varied, experiences that arise in ordinary life, in moments of grief or beauty or sudden stillness, without the context of deliberate concentration. The two categories overlap but are not the same.
This is not what the tradition means by full enlightenment.
The Buddhist teaching traditions have complex, often divergent accounts of what complete awakening entails, and most would not identify a single significant experience, however real and transformative, with that full realization. The accounts in the archive describe something genuinely important that happened; they do not necessarily describe the endpoint the tradition points toward. Holding this distinction gently is useful: it respects both what happened and the tradition's more extended map.
How do Buddhist accounts compare to Christian ones in the archive?
The surface language is strikingly different: Christian accounts describe encounter and relationship, while Buddhist accounts describe recognition and dissolution. But the underlying phenomenological markers, a sense of profound significance, a shift in the relationship to self and time, clarity about what matters, lasting change — appear across both groups. Researchers have debated whether this convergence reflects a shared reality being described in different vocabularies, or similar neurological events being interpreted through different frameworks. The archive data supports the existence of the convergence; it cannot settle the debate about what causes it.
Is samadhi the same as what the archive documents?
Probably not in the strict sense, though the categories may overlap for some accounts. Samadhi refers to specific absorption states that arise in concentrated meditation practice, with their own distinct phenomenological signature. The Hardy Archive documents a broader and more varied range of experiences, many arising outside formal practice, in ordinary life contexts, that include but are not limited to what might be classified as samadhi. If your experience occurred in the context of deep concentration practice, the samadhi category may be relevant; if it arose in ordinary life, the archive's broader documentation of spontaneous experience is likely the closer fit.
Can I have these experiences without years of practice?
The archive suggests yes. While several of the Buddhist-framed accounts describe experiences arising from sustained practice, the archive as a whole, including the syncretic and secular accounts, contains many descriptions of experiences with comparable features arriving without any prior contemplative training. Practice appears to be one pathway, not the only one. The contemplative traditions themselves often acknowledge this: some teachers describe practice as one way of opening what can also open spontaneously, offering not unique access but better tools for understanding and integrating what arrives.