90 CHAPTER FOURlater "emptiness" Sutras, such as the Vimalakirti-nirde.Sa, Lotus, and Srimiilii
Sutras. The early Sunyaviidins, or proponents of emptiness, referred to the Bud-
dha's teachings as skillful means having only a provisional truth, but the only
skillful means they mentioned were traditional ones: the Four Noble Truths,
the Noble Eightfold Path, the doctrine of dependent co-arising. However, if
all provisional truths are equally empty, it can be argued that almost anything,
if intended as a means for sparking realizations, could qualifY as a skillful means
to the goal.
This argument is actually advanced in the later emptiness Sutras. For in-
stance, the Lotus Sutra (see Section 5.5.2) explicitly states that lies can be valid
"skillful means" (although it avoids calling them lies), which probably explains
the Mahayana penchant for attributing its Sutras to the historical Buddha. Vi-
malakirti, the lay b9dhisattva, also resorts to unconventional means (Strong
EB, sec. 4.4.5), based on the rationale that "true meditation is to enter into
nirval).a without cutting off the passions of the world." The bodhisattva can
work and play in the secular world without fear of contamination from sense
objects, because pure and impure are themselves both ultimately empty of
permanent essence. He may associate with merchants, kings, harlots, and
drunkards without falling into avarice, arrogance, lust, or dissipation. He may
play the role oflay man rather than monastic, and may choose to be born as a
woman, to affirm the point that such distinctions as lay and monastic, male
and female, are essentially empty. In fact, many statements in the Vimalakirti-
nirde§a SiUra imply that it is better to lead a life involved in the world than to
retreat into the seclusion of the traditional Path, for "only in the swamp of
passion are there living creatures to produce the qualities ofBuddhahood."
The Srimiilii Sutra is even more explicit in regards to the relativity of skill-
ful means, stating that ofth·e Four Noble Truths, only one, cessation, is actu-
ally true, whereas the rest are fictions, in that all compounded things are
fictitious. Thus the Path has no truth status to set it apart from anything else
that might be proposed as a skillful means. This teaching, although it was prob-
ably intended simply as a mental therapy for closed attitudes, eventually pro-
vided the rationale for maintaining that any behavior motivated by
compassion, even if it blatantly violated the Noble Eightfold Path, could also
qualifY as a means to the goal. This opened the way for Buddhist Tantrism in
later centuries (see Section 6.3).
As the emptiness approach began to lose its novelty, new Mahayana Sutras
began to break from the earlier emptiness Sutras and treatises by turning
emptiness, viewed as a perceptual mode, into a metaphysical absolute, termed
the Dharmakiiya (literally, Dharma-body). In the Hinayana texts, the term
Dharmakiiya had simply denoted the body of the Buddha's recorded teachings,
but the new Sutras recast the term to denote both the potential for Awaken-
ing and also the source from which all things spring. In contrast to this meta-
physical absolute, emptiness as an attribute of dharmas seemed to become
more and more akin to nihilism. The resulting dichotomy formed the dialec-
tic that gave rise to a new school in the Mahayana, the Yogacara.