This story is from the Vimalakirti Sutra, a scripture in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition which was perhaps written at the end of the 1st century CE. The central character is the lay person Vimalakirti, who is portrayed as being profoundly enlightened. He has trained very deeply in Mahayana Buddhism, and in the early part of the scripture many of the Buddha’s disciple describe how they have been shown up by his deeper understanding of the teaching.

In The Scripture of Great Wisdom, also known as the Heart Sutra, there are the following lines:

From the perspective of emptiness, there is… no knowledge and no attainment. With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on Great Wisdom, and thus the mind is without hindrance.

These lines emphasise that Buddhist practice is not a matter of attaining something, but a few lines later on the scripture also says:

All Buddhas of past, present, and future rely on Great Wisdom and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.

If Buddhist practice is not a matter of attaining something, what does it mean that all Buddhas attain enlightenment? Is the scripture disagreeing with itself, or is there something deeper that is being pointed to here?

In the last part of Shariputra’s conversation with the goddess, the Vimalakirti Scripture explores exactly this issue of the meaning of attainment, and several other scriptures address it as well.

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Shariputra has now been speaking with the goddess for some time, and although she has very much been in the role of a teacher, with him as the pupil, Shariputra still can’t quite acknowledge to himself the depth of the goddess’s understanding. He still appears to assume that his practice is further advanced than hers, and asks her when she will realise enlightenment (and so perhaps, in his mind, catch up with where he has got to).

(In reading the scripture it’s important to realise that it was written several centuries after the time of the Buddha, and that the real Shariputra never thought, said or did any of the things attributed to him in the scripture. The character of Shariputra is simply being used to help bring out the meaning of the teaching that is being offered. Similarly, the inclusion of the character of the goddess doesn’t imply that Buddhism teaches or believes that there really are such beings; it is just helpful to the story to have a character who has ‘powers’ that ordinary humans don’t have.)

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Shariputra asked the goddess, “When will you attain unsurpassed complete enlightenment (anuttara-samyak-sambodhi)?”

The goddess replied, “Shariputra, when you return to being a common unenlightened person, that’s when I will succeed in attaining supreme enlightenment.”

Shariputra is quite indignant at the suggestion that he might return to how he was before he started practising, and says, “It’s unthinkable that I should ever become a common person again!”

The goddess said, “And in just the same way, it’s impossible that I should attain supreme enlightenment. Why? Because supreme enlightenment isn’t a goal, and so is not something that can be attained.”

Here the goddess is putting forward exactly the same teaching as is in the first quote, above, from the Heart Sutra, that Buddhist practice is not a matter of attaining anything. Shariptura responds by asking about all the Buddhas of present, past and future who have attained enlightenment, which is exactly what the second quote from the Heart Sutra expresses.

Shariputra said, “But what about all the Buddhas, as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, who are now attaining unsurpassed complete enlightenment, and those who have attained it in the past, and those who will attain it in the future? If enlightenment cannot be attained, how do you explain their attainment of enlightenment?”

The goddess said, “In our everyday speech we can talk about Buddhas as being in the past, present, or future, but that doesn’t mean that these terms have any relevance when we are talking about enlightenment.” The goddess is pointing to enlightenment being the nature of existence, and so there isn’t a ‘before and after’, and talking about past, present and future isn’t relevant. She then asked, “Shariputra, have you attained the way of the arhat?”

Shariputra replied, “I have let go of any sense of someone who attains arhatship, or of there being any such goal as arhatship that could be attained, and so in that sense I’ve attained it.”

The goddess said, “Quite so, and it’s just like that with the Buddhas and bodhisattvas as well. They are one with supreme enlightenment because they have realised that there really is nothing to attain.”

The goddess’s answers to Shariputra convey her deep understanding of the teaching, which the scripture is portraying as being more advanced than Shariputra’s understanding. The scripture doesn’t record what Shariputra’s response was to her last statement, but perhaps he was looking a little overwhelmed by the encounter, because after the goddess had finished speaking, Vimalakirti came up to him to reassure him. Vimalakirti said to Shariputra, “This goddess has made offerings to many millions of Buddhas, has the powers of a bodhisattva, has fulfilled all that she vowed to do, and has fully accepted the truth of no-birth and no-death, which she won’t regress from. In fulfilment of her original vows she can appear to beings whenever she wishes in order to teach and convert all living things.”

It’s not clear whether or not Shariputra actually realises that he has just been one of those beings who the goddess has appeared to in order to teach and convert.

***

The goddess’s explanation helps us to understand the seeming contradiction in the Heart Sutra: There is indeed nothing to attain, and with nothing to attain a bodhisattva roots and grounds themselves in Great Wisdom. It is this very immersion in Great Wisdom that is then described as the unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment which a Buddha ‘attains’. This is highlighted in the next section of the scripture, where it says, “Great Wisdom is the end of suffering”. Instead of using the word attains, it can be more helpful to phrase it as ‘the unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment which a Buddha realises’, in the sense of making it real in their own life, in their own practice.

The OBC version of the Heart Sutra conveys quite well this non-dual realising of unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment when it says, “All the Buddhas True of present, past and future they are all, because upon Great Wisdom they rely, the perfect and most high enlightenment”. The Buddhas of all ages are the perfect and most high enlightenment. They embody it and manifest it.

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For anyone who is serious about Buddhist practice, it can seem very confusing and paradoxical that there is nothing to attain. Of course, we still have to work at letting go of our greed, anger and delusion, our fears and desires, since otherwise we are not able to see clearly the enlightened nature of existence. Our minds are too disturbed and distracted, and a significant part of our problem is that we can’t quite believe that we are Buddha-from-the-beginning, and we can’t quite believe that this world here and now could already be the world of enlightenment. It’s just the same position that Shariputra (again!) finds himself in at the beginning of the Vimalakirti Scripture, when he sees the world as being filthy and inconvenient, but the Buddha then reveals to him that it is already the Buddha Land (see Seeing the Buddha Land).

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Great Master Dōgen makes the same point in Rules for Meditation (Fukanzazengi), where he starts off by asking, “Why are training and enlightenment differentiated since the Truth is universal?” ‘The Truth being universal’ means that all existence is Buddha, including us. As this is so, it is just a confusion in our minds that we divide things into a state of unenlightenment, which we consider ourselves to be in and think of ourselves as training to get beyond, and a state of enlightenment, which we imagine as being off in the future, and which is often just a word that we grasp on to, with not much understanding of what it might actually mean. Dōgen also urges not to strive to become Buddha.

Another way of describing this, is that Dōgen, just like the goddess in the Vimalakirti Sutra, is urging us not to see enlightenment in terms of a before and an after, but rather that, as he writes in his commentary on the Buddhist Precepts (the Kyojukaimon), ‘enlightenment ranges from time eternal and is, even now’. Enlightenment is already here, already available, and always has been. We are not lacking anything, and at the same time we need to learn how to see clearly the nature of reality. As Dōgen also says in the Kyojukaimon, ‘The wheel of the Dharma turns constantly, lacks for nothing and needs something’; we need to see the true nature of things, but enlightenment is not a question of before and after.

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Dōgen continues this theme in one of the chapters of his major work, the Shōbōgenzō, in which, after saying, “What you think one way or another before realization is not a help for realization”, he says,

“Although realization is not like any of the thoughts preceding it, this is not because such thoughts were actually bad and could not be realization. Past thoughts in themselves were already realization. But since you were seeking elsewhere, you thought and said that thoughts cannot be realization.”

The issue is that we don’t believe that this existence here and now is already Buddha, already enlightenment, and so are looking for it anywhere else but here. But here and now is the only place and time that it can be, and so in looking elsewhere we miss the precious jewel that we already have access to.

When Dōgen says, “What you think one way or another before realization is not a help for realization”, he is pointing out that our ideas about what “attaining supreme enlightenment” means, or is like, are of no help to us because, if we don’t know it for ourselves, then these ideas are just speculation. Not only are our ideas of enlightenment not a help, they actually hinder us, as we tend to try to fit ourselves to this imagined idea of enlightenment, which is itself mistaken. Dōgen says, “Realization is not like your conception of it”. He also says,

“When you realise buddha-dharma, you do not think, ‘This is realization just as I expected.’ Even if you think so, realization invariably differs from your expectation. Realization is not like your conception of it.”

He ends the section by saying, “Know then that there is no delusion, and there is no realization”. If there is no before and after, then there are not two different states, which here he refers to as ‘delusion’ and ‘realization’, and which in Rules for Meditation he calls ‘training’ and ‘enlightenment’.

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There is a well-known description of bodhisattva practice, which says that bodhisattvas don’t enter nirvana until all beings can enter nirvana. In the Lankavatara Sutra the Buddha takes this further and says that bodhisattvas actually never enter nirvana. This seems like a very disturbing and paradoxical statement, but the Buddha then goes on to say that, “Bodhisattvas know that everything is already nirvana, and this is why they never enter nirvana.”

This is saying just the same thing as Shariputra and the goddess were describing, and the Buddha summarises it as, “The practice of bodhisattvas includes the vow not to enter nirvana until all beings enter nirvana. However, what they mean by entering nirvana is characterized by not entering nirvana.”

The goddess had said that all the Buddhas of past, present and future, “are one with supreme enlightenment (have entered nirvana) because they have realised that there really is nothing to attain (characterized by not entering nirvana).” When Buddhas truly realise that there is nothing to attain, it is this very immersion in Great Wisdom that is then described as the unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment which a Buddha ‘attains’.

Buddhas and bodhisattvas know that samsara and nirvana are not two different things, that this existence here and now is already the world of enlightenment, and so there is nothing else to enter. There is no ‘entering nirvana’, but not because we will always be outside it, but because we see that we were always within it already. For a bodhisattva to seek to enter nirvana would be like a drop of sea-water asking how it can enter the sea. It’s not just that the drop of sea-water is already ‘in’ the sea, but that the sea itself is made up of exactly such of drops of sea water. Similarly, not only is the bodhisattva already the manifestation, the actualisation, of enlightenment, but is also an intrinsic part of what ‘the Buddha that is the whole universe’ is made up of.

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And finally, in the Diamond Sutra the Buddha gives the same teaching again, when his disciple Subhuti asks him:

“World-honoured One, is it the case that when the Buddha attained unsurpassed complete enlightenment, nothing was actually attained?”

The Buddha replies, “It is just as you say, Subhuti, in unsurpassed complete enlightenment there is not even the slightest thing that could be attained, and this is why it is called unsurpassed complete enlightenment.”

At another point in the scripture the Buddha himself asks Subhuti a similar question, which Subhuti answers with a slightly different emphasis. The Buddha asks,

“Subhuti, what would you say, has the Tathagata attained unsurpassed complete enlightenment? Does he have a Dharma teaching to convey?”

Subhuti replies, “As far as I have understood what the Buddha has said, there is no independently existing state of being called ‘unsurpassed complete enlightenment’, and there is no ‘thing’ called a teaching which the Buddha could convey. Why is this? The teaching that the Buddha refers to can’t be got hold of, nor encapsulated in words. It does not have independent self-existing nature, nor is it non-existent, and it is this unconditioned Dharma which all true teachers base their teaching in.”

This refers back to the teaching of part 2 of Shariputra’s meeting with the goddess, which is the teaching of emptiness, that there is no separate self. This section emphasises that, not only is there no attaining anything, but it is a mistaken view even to see enlightenment as a ‘thing’ apart from this reality which could be attained. Not only this, but if there is no separate self, then who is that could attain enlightenment anyway?

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All of these different aspects come together in the teaching that Shariputra and the goddess discuss, that bodhisattvas rely on Great Wisdom (the teachings of emptiness which emphasise that there is no separate self), and so the mind is without hindrance. When the mind is without hindrance, a bodhisattva sees that there is not only nothing to attain, but no separate being that could attaining anything. Just in the same way, because all Buddhas of present, past and future realise that there is nothing to attain, and have let go of any sense of a being who could attain anything, they can be described as having ‘attained’ unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.

This is how The Litany of Maitreya Bodhisattva describes what it means to dwell in Great Wisdom:

“This is the dwelling place of those … who are content to go seeking
without any chance of attaining anything,
and who are free of any sense of anything going anywhere.”

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Sources:

There are several different translations of the Vimalakirti Sutra. The version of the story above is mainly based on the translation by Burton Watson:

Watson, Burton. The Vimalakirti Sutra. Columbia University Press, 1997. ISBN 9780231106566

See also the translation by Charles Luk (Lu K’uan Yü):

Lu, Kuanyu. Ordinary Enlightenment: A Translation of the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra. Shambhala, 2003. ISBN 1570629714

Translations of The Scripture of Great Wisdom (Heart Sutra) referred to:

The official version of the Sotoshu, the Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist organisation:
https://www.sotozen.com/eng/practice/sutra/pdf/01/04.pdf

The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity. Shasta Abbey Press, Mt. Shasta, Second Edition 1990, ISBN 0-930066-12-X

Great Master Dōgen’s Rules for Meditation (Fukanzazengi) can be found in The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity, see above.

The quotes from Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō are from a chapter called Yuibutsu Yobutsu, which is translated as Only Buddha and Buddha, and is from:

Tanahashi, K. (1985) Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen. San Francisco: North Point Press.

The quotes from the Lankavatara Sutra are from:

Pine, R. (2012) The Lankavatara Sutra: A Zen Text. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

There are many different translations of the Diamond Sutra, including:

Hsing Yun and Graham, T. (2001) Describing the Indescribable: A commentary on the Diamond Sutra. Boston: Wisdom.

Nhat Hạnh, Thich. (1992) The Diamond that Cuts through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Diamond Sutra. Berkeley, Calif: Parallax Press.

The Litany of Maitreya Bodhisattva is from the liturgy of the OBC.