The Vimalakirtinirdesa is the most entertaining Mahayana sutra, and the one that most enjoys making monks uncomfortable.

Its protagonist is a layman: a wealthy householder of Vaisali with a wife and children, who visits gambling halls and brothels and taverns, who does business, and who is more deeply realised than any of the Buddha’s monastic disciples. The sutra’s dramatic engine is watching him demonstrate this.

The setup #

Vimalakirti is ill — or appears to be. The Buddha proposes to send someone to enquire after his health.

He asks Sariputta, foremost in wisdom. Sariputta declines, and explains why: he was once meditating under a tree when Vimalakirti appeared and told him that sitting in meditation is not what he thought it was. Real sitting, Vimalakirti said, is not manifesting body or mind in the three worlds; not rising from absorption while conducting ordinary affairs; not abandoning the path while engaging with the world. Sariputta had no reply.

The Buddha asks Moggallana, foremost in psychic powers. He declines: he was teaching the Dharma to laypeople when Vimalakirti corrected his presentation.

He asks Mahakassapa, foremost in ascetic practice. He declines: he had been begging only among the poor, to give them the opportunity for merit, and Vimalakirti pointed out that the practice of equanimity requires begging without discrimination.

He asks Subhuti, Purna, Katyayana, Aniruddha, Upali, Rahula, Ananda — every one of the great disciples in turn. Each declines, and each tells the story of being comprehensively outclassed by Vimalakirti.

He then asks the bodhisattvas. Maitreya declines, Prabhavyuha declines, Jagatimdhara declines, Sudatta declines.

Finally Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, agrees to go — with the observation that it will be difficult.

The whole assembly follows, wanting to watch.

The room #

Vimalakirti’s room is empty, and he is alone in bed.

Manjushri asks about his illness, and receives the sutra’s central answer:

Because the ignorance and craving of living beings are without end, my sickness is without end. Were all living beings to be free from sickness, I also would not be sick. Why? The bodhisattva enters birth and death for the sake of living beings, and where there is birth and death, there is sickness. If living beings can be cured of sickness, then the bodhisattva will no longer be sick.

The illness is not his. It is the bodhisattva’s participation in the condition of beings — the illness of a parent whose child is ill.

The empty room then produces a series of demonstrations. Thirty-two thousand vast lion thrones are brought from a distant buddha-field and fit into it without the room expanding or the thrones shrinking. An entire world-system is placed in the room. The sutra is unembarrassed about the physics: this is the Huayan vision of interpenetration, dramatised.

The goddess and Sariputta #

The sutra’s most-discussed episode.

A goddess living in Vimalakirti’s house scatters flowers over the assembly. They fall away from the bodhisattvas and stick to the monks, who try to brush them off and cannot.

The goddess explains: the flowers do not stick where discrimination has ended. The monks are troubled by the flowers because they hold the idea that flowers on robes are improper — the problem is in the monks, not the flowers.

Sariputta then engages her in debate and is comprehensively defeated. Exasperated, he asks why she does not change out of her female body.

She replies that she has looked for twelve years and has never found any “female state” to change out of — and then uses her powers to swap their bodies. Sariputta finds himself in the goddess’s form and she in his.

She asks: why do you not change out of your female body?

He says he does not know what to change.

That, she says, is the point. If you could change out of your female form, then all women could. As it is, you are not a woman and appear as one — and just so, all women appear as women and are not.

She restores their bodies and observes that all phenomena are neither male nor female.

The passage is the sharpest statement in Buddhist literature on the constructedness of gender, and it is aimed squarely at the most eminent monk in the tradition. See Women in Buddhism.

The thunderous silence #

The climax. Vimalakirti asks the assembled bodhisattvas how one enters the gate of non-duality.

Thirty-one of them answer, each identifying a pair of opposites — arising and ceasing, self and not-self, purity and impurity, samsara and nirvana, good and evil — and explaining how the dualism is transcended.

Then Manjushri answers: to say nothing, to express nothing, to indicate nothing, to name nothing — that is entry into non-duality.

Manjushri then turns to Vimalakirti and asks for his answer.

Vimalakirti says nothing.

Manjushri: “Excellent! Excellent! Not a single word, not a syllable — this is the true entrance into non-duality.”

The episode became known as “Vimalakirti’s thunderous silence,” and it is among the most cited passages in Chan and Zen. The structure is exact: Manjushri’s answer that one should say nothing is still a statement, and Vimalakirti demonstrates rather than describes.

Why it mattered #

In China, this was one of the most popular sutras ever translated. The reasons are not mysterious.

Chinese culture, with its Confucian emphasis on family duty, had a standing objection to Buddhist monasticism as unfilial — leaving the household, not producing descendants, not serving the ancestors. See Buddhism in China.

Vimalakirti answers it directly: here is a layman with a family and a business who is more realised than the monks. A literate Chinese gentleman could read this sutra and find himself in it.

It became a favourite of the scholar-official class, was painted repeatedly — the cave murals at Dunhuang include many Vimalakirti scenes, typically showing him reclining and debating — and shaped the Chinese conception of the ideal lay Buddhist.

In Chan, the emphasis on direct demonstration over verbal formulation, and on the ordinary as the site of realisation, is recognisably Vimalakirti’s.

Reading it #

Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation (406 CE) is the version East Asian Buddhism uses and is a literary achievement in its own right. A Sanskrit manuscript was discovered in Lhasa in 1999, the first known, which allowed the first translations from the original.

Burton Watson’s translation from the Chinese (Columbia, 1997) is the most readable. Robert Thurman’s (Penn State, 1976) is from the Tibetan and is livelier in places. John McRae’s (BDK, 2004) is from the Chinese with scholarly apparatus.

It is short — a hundred pages or so — and it is genuinely funny, which almost no other sutra is. The sequence of disciples declining the errand, each with a fresh story of humiliation, is comic writing.

Common questions #

Is Vimalakirti a historical figure? Almost certainly not. He is a literary creation, and the sutra dates to perhaps the second century CE.

Does the sutra attack monasticism? It attacks a particular attitude — attachment to monastic form as the measure of attainment, and discrimination between the pure and the impure. It does not propose that the monastic order be abolished, and the Buddha in the sutra remains the Buddha. The point is that realisation is not confined to a status.

Is the goddess episode really about gender? It is about the emptiness of categories generally, with gender as the case worked in detail — and it chooses that case, and chooses Sariputta as its target, for a reason. It has been central to modern Buddhist feminist scholarship, and also read as being about non-duality with gender as incidental illustration. Both readings are available in the text.

Why is Vimalakirti sick? Because beings are sick. The illness is the bodhisattva’s participation in the condition of others, not a personal affliction — and it is also, on one reading, a skilful means to gather an audience.

Does Theravada accept this sutra? No. It is a Mahayana text, outside the Pali Canon.

Sources & further reading #

Burton Watson (trans.), The Vimalakirti Sutra (Columbia, 1997) — the most readable English version. Robert A. F. Thurman (trans.), The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti (Penn State, 1976). John R. McRae (trans.), The Sutra of Queen Śrīmālā of the Lion’s Roar and The Vimalakīrti Sutra (BDK America, 2004) — freely available. Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism (Routledge, 2nd ed. 2009), ch. 6. Diana Y. Paul, Women in Buddhism (University of California Press, 2nd ed. 1985) — on the goddess episode and related material.