1. Setting the Scene: Magic of the Mahāyāna

The sūtra opens in Vaiśālī with a majestic assembly of enlightened beings, bodhisattvas, devas, and disciples gathered around the Buddha. A canopy offered by devotees miraculously reflects the entire universe, symbolizing how the mind shapes perception. This magic-realism frames the text’s core teaching: reality is inconceivable, and liberation lies in awakening to that inconceivability.

2. Enter Vimalakīrti: The Perfect Lay Bodhisattva

Vimalakīrti, a layman of extraordinary realization and skill in upāya (skillful means), feigns illness to draw bodhisattvas and disciples into dialogue. He is a householder who lives as a Buddha, engaging in commerce, politics, and daily life while embodying non-duality and deep insight. This challenges traditional views of renunciation.

The Year Four guide notes that this figure “is a spiritual community,” perhaps a personification of the Dharma in society—not confined to monasteries but active in the world.

3. Building the Buddha-Land

A central teaching is that the purity of a Buddha-land reflects the purity of the bodhisattva’s mind. The world appears pure or impure based on our mental clarity. Vimalakīrti shows how a bodhisattva builds a pure land through generosity, tolerance, wisdom, and the other perfections—not by escaping the world, but by transforming it from within.

This ties in with Sangharakshita’s emphasis on “creating the new society,” a spiritual community embedded in this world.

4. The Bodhisattva as Shape-shifter: All Things to All Beings

The text celebrates adaptability. Vimalakīrti embodies any form needed to benefit beings, using humour, paradox, and drama to dissolve fixed views. As Sangharakshita notes, “you cannot help yourself without helping others, and vice versa.” True liberation includes total openness to others’ needs.

5. The Critique of Religion

Vimalakīrti deconstructs religion as fixed institution. He criticizes attachment to rituals and status, reminding us that forms should serve liberation, not become ends in themselves. He tells Śāriputra off for clinging to conceptual understanding—enlightenment is not a possession.

This supports the Triratna perspective that the Dharma is a means to liberation, not a system to defend.

6. The Encounter with Mañjuśrī: Non-Duality

In a central scene, Vimalakīrti and Mañjuśrī exchange profound teachings on non-duality. When each bodhisattva defines non-duality, Vimalakīrti finally answers with thunderous silence—expressing the inexpressible.

Non-duality here means not grasping distinctions like self/other, existence/non-existence. This theme mirrors śūnyatā, the emptiness at the heart of all phenomena.

7. The Goddess and Gender Fluidity

A goddess transforms Śāriputra into a woman to show that Enlightenment has no gender. This radical teaching reveals how liberation transcends not just worldly identities, but even conventional spiritual categories.

It invites reflection on the fluidity of experience and challenges all forms of essentialism.

8. Communication Beyond Words

Later scenes explore subtle communication. In a different Buddha-field, beings converse through perfume—a metaphor for non-verbal, intuitive, and aesthetic ways of conveying the Dharma. Vimalakīrti demonstrates that the Dharma is best “tasted” than explained.

This resonates with Sangharakshita’s view that myth, poetry, and beauty are essential spiritual languages.

9. The Four Great Reliances

The text ends with an exhortation to rely not on words, but on meaning; not on the person, but the Dharma; not on conceptual teachings, but on direct experience (jñāna rather than vijñāna). This closes the loop: true Dharma practice is dynamic, experiential, and rooted in awareness.

Summery of chapter 1: Purification of the Buddha-Field

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✦ Key Themes for Reflection

• Emancipation is inconceivable—beyond concepts, accessible through insight and practice.
• A Buddha-land is built through our mental states and ethical action.
• Skillful means requires fluid identity and deep compassion.
• True communication is non-verbal, resonant, mythic.
• Vimalakīrti isn’t just a person—he represents the liberated mind in society.

Robert Thurman: Who was Vimalakirti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNfycuaWKjQ

The Teaching of Vimilakirti ,Translated by Robert A. F. Thurman and first published, under the title The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti: A Mahāyāna Scripture
, by the Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park and London, in 1976 https://84000.co/translation/toh176

Robert Thurman’s Translation

There are copies of Sangharakshita’s lectures below and the text of Robest Thurman’s translation.