Ursula K. Le Guin famously wrote that science fiction “is not predictive; it is descriptive” (The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969). Similarly, the Vimalakirti Sutra, a 1st-3rd-century Mahayana Buddhist text, employs speculative world-building to challenge its audience’s assumptions about embodiment, perception, and the nature of reality. This paper argues that the Vimalakirti Sutra can be fruitfully read as an early work of speculative fiction, using its narrative devices to enact the genre’s characteristic disruption of fixed categories—here, of gender, embodiment, and “reality”—and prompting readers to reconsider how we theorize religion itself. I make three major claims: (1) speculative fiction’s premise of multiple dimensions parallels the sutra’s depiction of vast, interconnected realms, pushing against the assumption that religious texts require access to “truth claims” to be meaningful; (2) the sutra destabilizes normative embodiment through transformative events, such as a goddess turning the arhat Shariputra into a woman, complicating fixed categories of gender and bodily form; and (3) the sutra’s emphasis on sensory perception—particularly smell—introduces a form of non-verbal, interdimensional communication. This disrupts the privileging of sight and language as primary modes of religious understanding, offering a model of embodied perception that resists doctrinal confinement. Together, these narrative strategies emphasize freedom through embodied experience rather than propositional belief, allowing readers to approach religion not merely as doctrine but as world-making. Reading the Vimalakirti Sutra as speculative fiction encourages rethinking religion as a dynamic, imaginative force capable of resisting normative categories of embodiment, perception, and truth, offering new pathways for speculative and religious thought alike. By decentering linguistic and visual forms of religious meaning in favor of olfactory and embodied experience, the sutra offers a liberatory vision of interdimensional and intercorporeal religious encounter—pushing readers to reconsider the boundaries of both religious and human experience. This reading not only helps us better understand Buddhist thought but also exemplifies speculative fiction’s power to unbind religion from the strictures of doctrine, esoteric intellectualism, and anthropocentric experience.
This paper argues that the Vimalakirti Sutra, a 1st-3rd-century Mahayana Buddhist text, can be read as an early example of speculative fiction. Through world-building and narrative devices, it challenges assumptions about embodiment, perception, and reality, and its portrayal of multiple realms pushes against the idea that religious texts must rely on “truth claims” to be meaningful. The sutra also destabilizes normative embodiment through events like a goddess transforming the arhat Shariputra into a woman, challenging gender norms within and beyond Buddhist doctrine. Additionally, it emphasizes sensory perception—particularly smell—offering a model of embodied understanding that resists purely linguistic explanation. These strategies invite students to engage with religion as world-making rather than just doctrine, illustrating how speculative fiction can expand our thinking about embodiment, truth, and religious experience. By reframing the Vimalakirti Sutra as speculative fiction, we can explore religion as a dynamic, imaginative force that resists fixed categories.