“Lecture 148: The Way of Nonduality,”

This lecture focuses on Chapter 9: The Dharma Door of Nonduality, one of the climactic teachings of the text.

Here is a summary of the key points:

🌿 Context and Background

  • The lecture is the sixth in a series on The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa, a short but extraordinarily rich Mahāyāna scripture, filled with doctrinal exposition, poetry, humor, biography, and magical elements.
  • The Sutra emphasizes the profound, paradoxical, and often poetic way in which truth is conveyed in the Mahāyāna.

🪑 Opening Anecdote: Sariputra and the Chair

  • Vimalakīrti confronts Sariputra, who is worrying about seating arrangements instead of focusing on the Dharma.
  • Vimalakīrti asks: “Did you come here for the sake of the Dharma or for the sake of a chair?”
  • This humorous incident illustrates how easily we are distracted—a metaphor for how we get sidetracked in spiritual practice.

✨ Magical Displays and Teachings

  • Vimalakīrti conjures 3.2 million thrones from another Buddha land to accommodate the assembly—symbolizing the inconceivable nature of liberative power.
  • The teaching of “Inconceivable Liberation” points to freedom from conventional space and time.

🌸 The Goddess and Sariputra’s Discomfort

  • A goddess showers flowers on the assembly; they don’t stick to Bodhisattvas but do to Arahats like Sariputra—symbolizing clinging to form or rigidity.
  • Sariputra undergoes a magical gender transformation—again highlighting the fluidity of form and the challenge to fixed identity.

🧭 Paradoxical Teachings on the Tathāgata’s ‘Family’

  • Vimalakīrti explains the Bodhisattva’s “family” using metaphor:
    • Wisdom = mother, Skillful means = father,
    • Joy = wife, Compassion and Love = daughters, etc.
  • This poetic vision reimagines the spiritual life as a rich, symbolic ecosystem.

🌀 The Main Theme: The Way of Nonduality

  • Thirty-one Bodhisattvas answer the question:
    “How do Bodhisattvas enter the Dharma Door of Nonduality?”
  • Each Bodhisattva presents a pair of dualities—self/other, attention/distraction, sin/sinlessness—and demonstrates how the transcendence of the duality itself is the path.

Examples:

  1. Distraction and Attention
    → Integration (understanding inner causes of distraction) is the entry into nonduality.
  2. Bodhisattva vs. Disciple Mind
    → Seeing both as constructs of the same illusionary mind (maya-citta).
  3. Sinfulness and Sinlessness
    → Not being bound by group approval or disapproval; cultivating transcendental individuality.
  4. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha
    → Realising all three are expressions of the unconditioned.

🔇 The Climax: Vimalakīrti’s Thunderous Silence

  • After all replies, Manjusri critiques them as still dualistic—since they are conceptual.
  • He concludes: to express nothing is the entrance into nonduality.
  • Vimalakīrti’s response is silence—a silence of realization, not conceptual negation.

🪟 What is a ‘Dharma Door’?

  • “Dharma Door” (dharmamukha) means entryway into reality.
  • A teaching (conceptual) can be a door to the truth (nonconceptual)—but only if not mistaken for the truth itself.

🧭 The Core Insight

  • We must use dualistic teachings and experiences to go beyond dualism.
  • Nonduality is not a state we can grasp—but a transformation in how we relate to opposites.

🧩 Alternative, Everyday Nondualities

Sangharakshita offers modern analogues:

  • Masculine and feminine are two; individuality is the entrance into nonduality.
  • Teacher and taught are two; communication is the entrance.
  • God and man are two; blasphemy is the entrance (provocative, to challenge fixed notions).

📌 Final Reflection

  • The Way of Nonduality is not the erasure of distinctions but a radical re-seeing:
    using concepts to go beyond concepts, using silence to transcend both speech and silence.
  • Vimalakīrti’s method is playful, paradoxical, and profound.