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WorkŚāntideva

Bodhicaryāvatāra

A monk's guide in verse to living for others, from the first resolve to the wisdom that finds no self to protect.

by Śāntideva118 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Overview

In the poem's second verse its author says that nothing new will be said here, that he has no skill at composition, and that he wrote it to train his own mind. What follows is a guide, in about 900 verses and ten chapters, to becoming a bodhisattva, someone who sets out to become a Buddha for the sake of every other being. Śāntideva, a monk whom historians place around the eighth century, wrote it as a sequence of practices rather than as a treatise: it opens on the resolve to awaken and moves through confession, vigilance, patience, effort and meditation to wisdom. The sixth chapter argues that anger at someone who hurts you makes no more sense than anger at the bile that brings on great pain, since both act under causes they did not choose. The eighth asks why, if suffering is unwelcome to everyone alike, I should guard against my own and not against another's. Its answer: the self who would own the suffering is as unreal as a queue or an army, a name for a collection. The ninth takes on the dualist philosophers of Sāṃkhya, believers in a creator god and Buddhists of the Yogācāra, or Mind-Only, school, arguing in the manner of Madhyamaka, the Middle Way school, that nothing has a nature of its own. Biographies written centuries later in Tibet say that he recited the poem at Nālandā, the great monastic university, and rose into the air partway through the ninth chapter. By the early ninth century it had been translated into Tibetan, and Tibetan teachers from Tsongkhapa, founder of the Geluk school, to the present Dalai Lama have built on it. Modern philosophers set its argument about the self beside Derek Parfit's work on personal identity; the scholar of Buddhism Paul Williams attacked the argument in Altruism and Reality in 1998, and the dispute continues.

Key concepts

What are the two kinds of bodhicitta in this poem?

They are the wish to awaken for others and the setting out to do it. Bodhicitta, the mind bent on awakening for the sake of all beings, comes in both forms, and the poem marks the difference with travel: wanting to go is not yet going. The wish alone already bears great fruit, but only the mind that has set out, and acts on it, brings merit that never stops flowing.

Does the perfection of giving mean ending poverty?

No. A perfection is a quality of mind brought to its height, not a result in the world. If giving were perfected only once no one was poor, the Buddhas of the past would have failed, since the world is still poor. The poem places the perfection in the readiness to give away everything one has, together with its fruit, to all beings, and so in the mind itself.

Why does the poem rank patience above every other austerity?

Because, in its own words, there is no evil like hatred and no austerity like patience. Patience here means more than putting up with delay: it is meeting harm, insult and pain without hatred. It even finds a use for suffering, which humbles pride and wakes pity for others who suffer.

What are the two truths in the wisdom chapter?

They are the conventional truth and the ultimate truth. The conventional is the world as our understanding grasps it, with its people, things and causes, and the poem even says that the understanding itself belongs to this level. The ultimate lies beyond the reach of the understanding altogether. Teaching, practice and compassion work on the first level, while the second shows that nothing has a nature of its own.

Why does the poem end by giving its merit away?

Merit is the store of good that a good act leaves behind, and the last chapter dedicates all of it to others instead of keeping it. The poem turns into a long prayer that, through whatever good its making has produced, the blind may see, the deaf hear and those in pain be freed of it. Giving away the reward is the final step of the training, not an afterthought.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Resolve to Wake for Others

A good thought in an ordinary mind is rare and brief, like lightning on a cloudy night. The poem asks how so slight a thing could carry a whole life toward awakening for everyone's sake.

Śāntideva calls that resolve bodhicitta, the mind set on awakening, and treats it as the hinge of everything else. It is an alchemist's elixir that turns this impure body into the priceless jewel of a Buddha, and a human life able to hold it is a chance seldom found and easily wasted. The poem does not begin with doctrine but with a vow, made in the presence of the Buddhas, and it ends by stretching that vow as far as space and the world endure.

  • bodhicitta
  • bodhisattva vow
  • altruism
  • generosity
  • merit
  • human life
  • death
  • happiness
  • spiritual practice
  • perseverance

Enter a dialogue

Guarding the Mind, Disarming Anger

The world will not stop hurting us, so the only thing within reach is the mind that meets the hurt. What is at stake is whether anger is ever justified once we see what moves the people who wrong us.

No one can cover the whole earth with leather, Śāntideva observes, but leather on the soles of the feet covers it well enough. So with the mind: an elephant let off its chain does less harm than a mind left unguarded, and watchfulness is the only rope. Anger is the hardest case. A person who strikes is driven by causes as surely as bile brings on a fever, so to rage at the person rather than the stick, or the hatred behind it, is a muddle. An enemy becomes a gift, a treasure found at home.

  • anger
  • patience
  • mindfulness
  • afflictions
  • ethical discipline
  • virtue
  • causation
  • karma
  • attachment

Enter a dialogue

Whose Pain Is It?

Everyone shrinks from suffering in exactly the same way. If that is so, nothing seems to justify guarding one's own pain and leaving another's alone.

Śāntideva's answer turns on the self who would own the pain. A continuing self is like a queue or an army, a convenient name laid over many parts, and suffering belongs to no owner, so it is to be removed wherever it is found. From that he builds a practice he calls the supreme secret, exchanging self and other, putting the other in one's own place. The wisdom chapter then defends the emptiness of all things against rival schools, while keeping compassion as a working fiction for the sake of ending pain.

  • self and other
  • self-cherishing
  • compassion
  • suffering
  • emptiness
  • impermanence
  • consciousness
  • body
  • solitude
  • meditation
  • liberation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
118
distinct concepts
190
by passages held, corpus-wide
#475

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “compassion” and “suffering”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
compassionsuffering11
causationemptiness6
attachmentimpermanence5
karmavirtue4
compassionkarma3
emptinesssuffering3
impermanencekarma3
karmasuffering3
sufferingvirtue3
causationkarma2
compassionvirtue2
emptinessimpermanence2
attachmentcompassion1
attachmentemptiness1
attachmentsuffering1
attachmentvirtue1
causationcompassion1
causationimpermanence1
causationsuffering1
compassionemptiness1
compassionimpermanence1
emptinesskarma1
impermanencesuffering1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Bodhicaryāvatāra you are here SA
  2. Śikṣāsamuccaya

    The prose companion to the Bodhicaryāvatāra, which tells its own reader to study this book again and again for the detail of right conduct: the same ideal, set out through the scriptures it rests on.

     SA
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