From Buddhism: Buddha Amitabha

One day Ananda who, having noticed that the Buddha is in a state of spiritual exaltation, asks him what he is seeing or thinking about.

Thereupon, the Buddha relates how there was a line of eighty-one Tathagatas, beginning with Dipankara and ending with Lokesvararaja. In the period of this last Tathagata, a monk named Dharmakara forms the resolve of himself becoming a Buddha and asks the Tathagata to become his teacher and to describe to him what is Buddha and a Buddha-country ought to be. The Tathagata tells him not only of one but of all the Buddha-countries and the Buddhas presiding over them.

Having heard these discriptions, Dharmakara spends five kalpas revolving in his mind all their perfections and excellences and in the end resolves that they should all be concentrated in his own ksetra when he becomes a Buddha. He then reappears before Lokesvararaja and describes at length what his wishes are and what he wants his Buddha-country to be. These are contained in a list of 48 vows. It is these vows that form the nucleus of the sutra and they constitute a kind of prophecy of what, according Dharmakara’s ideas, Sakhavati or the Land Of Bliss ought to be. Dharmakara then becomes a bodhisattva and, having developed the qualities of bodhisattva for one hundred thousand niyutas of kotis of years, he ultimately attains supreme enlightenment.

All this is related by the Sakyamuni to Ananda as a sort of vision of what, in fact, had happened ten kalpas earlier. When Ananda asks the Sakyamuni where Dharmakara is at present, the answer is that he is now reigning Sakhavati as the Buddha Amitabha. The Sakyamuni then proceeds to describe Sakhavati, as a place of unparallel magnificence and splendor, in every way what Dharmakara had resolved it should be.

Ananda expresses a desire to see Amitabha, whereupon that Buddha sends a ray of light from the palm of his hand, so that not only Ananda but every living being could see Amitabha and his retinue of bodhisattvas in Sakhavati, while the inhabitants of Sakhavati could see the Sakyamuni and the whole of this, our world of Saha.