Called the "Jewel of the Mahayana Sutras," this book presents the major teachings of Mahayana Buddhism in a precise, dramatic, and even humorous form. For two millennia this Sutra has enjoyed immense popularity among Mahayana Buddhists in India, central and southeast Asia, Japan, and especially China, where its incidents were the basis for a style in art and literature prevalent during several centuries.
Vimalakirti, although an Indian, can be considered the first Zen Master- apart from the Buddha himself- as he specializes in a type of discourse that is subtle, in a lucidity that balances on the razor's edge of paradox and yet is quite logically coherent. His message is particularly appealing to our secular age, because he was a man of the world, not a monk or saint. In essence, Vimalakirti clears up the confusions surrounding the central Buddhist concept of emptiness (or voidness), presenting it not as nihilism but rather, in the translator's words, "as the joyous and compassionate commitment to living beings from an unwavering confrontation with the inconceivable profundity of ultimate reality."

Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti; A Mahayana Scripture, Robert A.F. Thurman, Motilal Banarsidass, Hardcover, 166 pages, $25.00

The translator of this volume, Robert A. F. Thurman, is Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York City, where he has taught since 1988. He holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in America. He received Upasika ordination in 1964 and Vajracharya ordination in 1971, both from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is president of Tibet House US, founded in 1987 under the patronage of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to preserve the endangered civilization of Tibet � and he began its Repatriation Collection of Tibetan Art. Among the foremost Buddhologists and interpreters of Tibet and its Buddhist civilization; he is also an ordained Buddhist layman

	Contents: THE HOLY TEACHING OF VIMALAKIRTI: A Mahayana Scripture
	Preface	ix
	Introduction	1
1	Purification of the Buddha-Field	10
2	Inconceivable Skill in Liberative Technique	20
3	The Disciples' Reluctance to Visit Vimalakirti	24
4	The Reluctance of the Bodhisattvas	34
5	The Consolation of the Invalid	42
6	The Inconceivable Liberation	50
7	The Goddess	56
8	The Family of the Tathagatas	64
9	The Dharma-Door of Nonduality	73
10	The Feast Brought by the Emanated Incarnation	78
11	Lesson of the Destructible and the Indestructible	84
12	Vision of the Universe Abhirati and the Tathagata Aksobhya	91
	Epilogue: Antecedents and Transmission of the Holy Dharma	96
	List of Abbreviations	103
	Notes	105
	Glossaries	137
	Sanskrit	137
	Numerical Categories	147
	Technical Terms	157