Vimalakīrti's Skillful Means

Kumārajīva opens his commentary on this chapter with a small but useful piece of framing: this entire chapter's praise of Vimalakīrti's virtues is the compilers' own doing, not something Vimalakīrti says of himself — "the compilers of the sūtra, carrying forward what they had heard [the Buddha say of him], set out his virtues in advance." Everything in this section happens before Vimalakīrti has spoken a single word in the text that bears his name; the sūtra is making sure its audience knows exactly who they are about to watch outmaneuver the Buddha's most senior disciples, one after another, in the chapters ahead.

"His mind was as vast as the ocean" draws one of Sengzhao's fuller similes: the ocean has five virtues worth naming one at a time — it is so clear it will not hold a corpse, it produces wondrous treasures in abundance, it can absorb a great dragon's rain poured out like cart-axles without ever overflowing, no wind or sun can ever exhaust it, and its depths cannot be fathomed. Vimalakīrti's mind, Sengzhao says, matches each of these in turn: pure enough to refuse the corpse of broken precepts, productive of the treasure of clear wisdom, able to receive the Buddha's great Dharma-rain without overflowing, unharmed by any wind or sun of demonic affliction, and, in its wisdom, simply too deep to be measured.

One line in the list of his skillful means — "he entered the brothels to show the fault of desire" — carries a specific story behind it in Kumārajīva's telling, worth having in mind for what "skillful means" actually meant in practice to this text's earliest readers. A woman of golden-hued beauty is courted by a rich young man with a thousand pieces of gold; on the way, Mañjuśrī appears to her in disguise, dressed even more finely, and when desire stirs in her at the sight of him, he tells her that to have such adornment she must first give rise to the mind of awakening — which, he says, is nothing other than her own body, empty exactly as awakening itself is empty. Having in a past life already planted the roots for this teaching to land, she attains the acquiescence to the birthlessness of phenomena on the spot; then, to make the lesson complete, she goes on with the young man as arranged, and once inside shows her body suddenly bloated, rotting, and foul — at which the terrified young man goes to the Buddha and is taught, and likewise attains realization. This is what "showing the fault of desire" meant in practice: not a warning delivered from outside desire, but a demonstration staged from directly within the scene desire is imagining.

Sengzhao notes something structurally important about this single sentence: however many and varied Vimalakīrti's skillful means are shown to be in the previous section, "this sūtra's own origin is rooted in his manifesting illness — that is why the compilers set this event apart with its own account." Everything that follows for the next twelve chapters — Mañjuśrī's visit, the disciples' declines, the goddess, the entry into non-duality — happens because of the illness introduced in this single line. Kumārajīva adds the practical logic behind its placement here, right after the long catalogue of Vimalakīrti's generosity across every class of society: people who have already felt the benefit of his giving and teaching are the ones who will come in large numbers to ask after his health, and it is precisely that large, receptive crowd that lets him "broadly teach the Dharma" rather than address only a few.

Sengzhao reads the first block of similes — foam, bubble, mirage, plantain, illusion, dream, shadow, echo, cloud, lightning — as ten variations on a single point about emptiness, each one chosen because it names something that looks substantial but has no core: a plantain trunk is "all leaf, no heartwood." The next block turns to a different argument. The body compared to earth, fire, wind, and water is not about impermanence but about selfhood specifically: "to act with total, unconstrained autonomy is what we call a self — but fire outside us rises and dies according to its fuel; fire has no autonomy of its own. Since outer fire has no self, the fire within the body, being of the same kind, has none either." The same logic runs through earth (masterless — whoever is strongest simply occupies it), wind (no fixed lifespan of its own, just gathered breath moving), and water (no fixed person in it — its shape bends to whatever contains it). Kumārajīva's summary of the whole sequence is direct: from "like foam" through "like lightning," the point is impermanence and emptiness; from earth through water, the point is that there is no fixed self anywhere to be found in what looks, from inside, so obviously like "me."

The image of the old well deserves its full telling, since the sūtra compresses in one clause a parable Kumārajīva's commentary unpacks in full, and the parable is one of the most famous in the whole tradition. A man has offended a king; fleeing the king's drunken war-elephant sent after him, he throws himself down an old, dry well. Halfway down he catches a rotten vine with one hand. Below him a venomous dragon breathes poison up at him; beside him five poisonous snakes threaten to strike; two mice, one black and one white, gnaw steadily at the very vine he is holding, which is already about to break; and above him the drunken elephant still waits at the mouth of the well. In the middle of this — genuinely mortal danger on every side — a drop of honey falls from a tree above into his mouth, and, tasting its sweetness, he forgets his terror entirely. The decoding follows in the same passage: the well is birth-and-death itself; the drunken elephant is impermanence; the poisonous dragon is the lower destinies; the five poisonous snakes are the five aggregates; the rotten vine is the life-root; the black and white mice are the waxing and waning of day and night eating away at that life-root without pause; and the drop of honey is the pleasure of the five desires — sweet enough, tasted once, to make a person forget every one of the dangers surrounding it. "This body is like an old well, pressed upon by old age" is this entire parable, compressed to five characters.

Zhu Daosheng's note on this closing turn addresses a question a careful reader will already be forming: if the Dharma-body is formless, without birth and without location, what is the relationship between it and the ordinary sixteen-foot human body the assembly can actually see standing — or, in this chapter, lying ill — in front of them? His answer reaches for an image this site's other sūtra translations do not otherwise use: "it is like the sun in the sky, reflected in every vessel that holds water — the ten thousand reflections in ten thousand shapes are each what that vessel itself captures; is that the sun's own doing? If a vessel holds no water, no reflection appears in it — not because the sun refuses to shine there, but because the vessel itself fails to receive it." The sixteen-foot response-body, on this account, is neither identical to the Dharma-body nor separate from it in the way two different objects are separate — it is what the Dharma-body looks like from within a particular vessel of receptivity, exactly as reflected sunlight is neither the sun itself nor something other than sunlight.

Kumārajīva's structural note explains why this teaching comes only after the body has been thoroughly examined and found wanting, rather than being stated first: the sūtra's usual method with newer listeners is to establish revulsion before offering the alternative, since "only once someone is no longer attached to the body can they go on to study the Dharma-body — hence the teaching of weariness comes first, and the teaching of the Dharma-body after." The chapter's closing line, that Vimalakīrti taught "so that thousands upon thousands of people all gave rise to the mind of unsurpassed, perfect and complete awakening," is the same outcome Mañjuśrī's own teaching produces three chapters ahead, and the same outcome nearly every one of Vimalakīrti's exchanges in this sūtra will produce by its end — a pattern worth watching for as the disciples' chapter, next, shows the same layman doing this to individuals rather than to a crowd.