Professor Paul Harrison

This talk will take as its point of departure a recently published English rendition of one of the most celebrated of all Mahāyāna sūtras, The Teaching of Vimalakīrti.* After briefly describing some aspects of the translation work and the textual sources on which it was based, the talk will move on to a discussion of the content of the sūtra. What is it actually about? How should we understand its various moves, narrative, literary and doctrinal? And what does Vimalakīrti still have to teach us? Luis Gómez and Paul Harrison, with Members of the Mangalam Translation Group, Vimalakīrtinirdeśa: The Teaching of Vimalakīrti: An English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Found in the Potala Palace, Lhasa (Berkeley: Mangalam Press, 2022).