If we define happiness as “a pursuit of pleasure and comfort,” then there is little in the Buddhist scripture that could be said to be written about happiness. In fact, such a term would be seen only as a target of critique. It is this pursuit of happiness that propels one into the reality that life in the world is limited and inevitably unsatisfactory. The Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa, a signature text of the Mahayana tradition, addresses the pressing need to find a harmony between the abstract doctrine of no-self and the secular pursuit of wellbeing, and eventually teaches freedom from the attachment to self and shows how the no-self doctrine can be used in thought and practice to experience a happier and more peaceful state of being. The argument put forth is that as one gains insight into the truth of emptiness and resolves to embody that insight in the world, we perceive and practice our existence as co-arising relationships with all other beings, deeply rooted to one other within the universal emptiness of non-selfness. Far from a vision of nihilistic annihilation, the non-self teaching allows one to understand the impossibility of alienation and the immediacy of one’s connection to all others. Those who comprehend the truth of emptiness are free from fixed notions of self versus other, subject versus object, absolute good and evil, beauty and grotesqueness, and as a direct result, they become free from the experience of suffering itself. Those who are free from clinging to dualities, even as they can perceive and relate to them, free from attachments, even as they work intimately with others to bring mutual salvation, can be free from the experience of suffering as well. By overcoming the habits of creating reified dualities, which in turn create false expectations which lead only to endless disappointment and pain, realized individuals enter a state of perfect peacefulness, and freedom. This is the only happiness a Buddhist can be said to seek.