The Vimalakīrti Sutra

A Mahāyāna sutra built around a lay hero, in fourteen chapters in Kumārajīva's Chinese version. Vimalakīrti, a wealthy householder of Vaiśālī who lives fully in the world yet practises perfectly, lets it be known that he is ill. The Buddha asks his great disciples and bodhisattvas to visit him, and each declines, recalling how Vimalakīrti once corrected him. Only Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, agrees to go. In the sickroom Vimalakīrti explains that he is ill because beings are ill. A goddess scatters flowers that stick to the disciples but not to the bodhisattvas, then turns Śāriputra into a woman to show that male and female have no fixed nature. In the chapter on nonduality the bodhisattvas each describe how to enter nonduality; Mañjuśrī says it lies beyond words; Vimalakīrti answers with silence. The sutra also teaches that a pure buddha-land comes from a purified mind, and it was especially loved in China and Japan.

It is the classic Buddhist case that awakening does not require leaving ordinary life, and it argues with humour against rigid lines between lay and monastic, male and female, sacred and worldly.