lain the response in words, praising Vimalakirti's rejection of "syllables, sounds, and ideas" (77).
This ultimate reliance on words is one of the key problems of Mahayana Buddhism. It conceives of preaching as a means of setting people on the road to enlightenment but preaching relies on language and language is inherently related to the evils of the world. When asked how the Buddha Sakyamuni teaches Dharma Vimalakirti explains that he must have reference to the evil of this world because people are like wild animals who cannot be tamed without a goad. Language is the only means, crude as it is, that is available for communication with human beings. Thus, much like the wilds animals, "living beings who are wild and hard to civilize are disciplined only by means of discourses about all kinds of miseries"--the miser
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