Śāntideva

It is festival season at Nālandā, sometime in the first half of the 8th century, and several thousand monks have gathered for a public recitation of scripture. Picture the place at its height: brick monasteries ranged around courtyards, a library said to rise nine storeys, lecture halls that a Chinese pilgrim — our companion Xuanzang, two generations back — described with the awe of a man who had walked five thousand miles to reach them. This is the greatest university on earth, and it runs on memory and merit: a monk's standing rests on the texts he can recite and the debates he can win.

Which is why tonight's entertainment has been so carefully arranged. There is a monk in residence whom the community has given up on. Nobody has ever seen him study. Nobody has seen him debate, or serve, or meditate. His brethren have coined a nickname for him from the only three things he has ever been observed doing — a syllable each for eating, sleeping and ambling back to his cell: Bhusuku. The one who eats, sleeps and strolls. A drain, in short, on the faithful's donations, and an embarrassment to the house. The seniors have decided to shame him into leaving. The method is exquisitely academic: invite him, with full honours, to take his turn reciting scripture before the whole assembly. Tradition says they built the teaching seat deliberately high, with no steps, savouring the picture of the fat idler scrambling at its base.

He does not scramble. In the Tibetan tellings the throne obligingly lowers itself, or he simply ascends; either way, he is suddenly seated above several thousand of the sharpest minds in Asia, perfectly composed. Then he asks the assembly a question that has echoed for twelve centuries — the politest ambush in the history of education:

Shall I recite something old — or something new?

Something new, they call back. Let the sluggard hang himself with his own rope. And the man they called Bhusuku begins, in flawless Sanskrit verse, a poem no one has ever heard, because he has composed it himself, in secret, in the nights they thought he was sleeping. It opens humbly — nothing new will be said here, and I have no skill in writing; I made this only to perfume my own mind — and then, verse by verse, it unfolds a complete map of the spiritual life: how the resolve to save all beings first flickers up in an ordinary heart, how to guard it, how to survive anger, how to dismantle selfishness with arguments, how to see through reality itself, and how, at the end, to give every scrap of merit away.

The poem is the Bodhicaryāvatāra — "Entering the Path of Awakening." The man's actual name, we may finally say, was Śāntideva, "god of peace." What happened when he reached the ninth chapter, the hagiographies save for their best page, and so will we.

The Life

Honesty first, as ever. Everything narrative we "know" about Śāntideva comes from Tibetan and Nepalese hagiographies written between four and nine centuries after his death — a short account by Vibhūticandra around 1200, then the church histories of Butön in the 14th century and Tāranātha in the early 17th, growing more marvellous with each telling. What can actually be established is short and solid: an 8th-century monk-scholar of Nālandā wrote the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Śikṣāsamuccaya; by about 763 CE another philosopher, Śāntarakṣita, was quoting him, which anchors the dates; and the two books agree so deeply in mind and method that one author behind both is not seriously doubted. The header's c. 685–763 is a reconstruction from Tibetan tradition; hold it loosely. Everything else is legend — but the legend of Śāntideva is one of the great character studies in Indian storytelling, the underestimated man told at full length, so let us have it properly, labelled.

The hagiographies make him a king's son — most say from Saurāṣṭra, the sea-facing peninsula of Gujarat, child of a ruler named Kalyāṇavarman, and himself named Śāntivarman. (Vibhūticandra's older account says a southern kingdom instead; royal birth is standard issue in Buddhist hagiography, and historians shrug at it.) He was devout from boyhood, devoted above all to Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva — an enlightenment-being who serves the world rather than leaving it — who embodies wisdom and carries a sword to cut delusion. When his father died and the coronation was prepared, the warnings came by night. Mañjuśrī appeared in a dream, seated on the very throne the prince was to mount in the morning: this seat is mine, and I am your teacher — we cannot both sit here. In Butön's telling the goddess Tārā, disguised as the prince's own mother, poured scalding water over him, and when he yelped, explained: kingship is exactly this — constant torture, like the hot waters of hell; she was letting him feel the throne in advance. The prince rode away that night, leaving a kingdom the way the Buddha once had — the oldest career move in this book's Buddhist chapters, performed here one last time.

He surfaces at Nālandā, ordained, studious — and invisible. This is the part of the legend that has endeared him to every slow-seeming student since: by day he displayed nothing. The tradition insists he was in fact studying, meditating and composing continuously — inwardly, at night, in secret; what the monastery saw was a man who ate, slept and strolled. Hence Bhusuku: the nickname is glossed as a stitched-together word, bhu from eating, su from sleeping, ku from ambling back to his cell — the exact activities differ with the teller, and at least one modern scholarly account glosses the third syllable less politely than "strolling." Then came the recitation you have already seen, and the vanishing we will come to. What matters here is the aftermath: he never took his seat at Nālandā again. The mortified monks sent search parties; they found him, say the tellings, living in the south, and what they asked him is a story we will save for the work itself, because it turns out to be, eerily, a real question of modern philology.

The rest of the legend cycle is the wandering life of a siddha, a wonder-working adept, told mostly by Tāranātha and impossible to check. He serves a king — Tāranātha names one Pañcamasiṃha — as a bodyguard carrying a wooden sword. A jealous rival denounces the fraud; the king demands to see the blade; Śāntideva warns him to cover one eye and draws — and the sword of Mañjuśrī blazes so fiercely that the king's open eye falls from its socket. (Śāntideva restores it; the king converts. Hagiographers are kind to their kings.) He wins a miracle-contest against a non-Buddhist teacher named Śaṅkaradeva — no relation to the philosopher waiting in our next chapter, though the coincidence makes a historian smile — blowing the rival's ritual diagram of the god Maheśvara out of the sky with a storm. He feeds multitudes from one bowl of rice in a famine. And then the tellings simply let him go, into the south, into silence. Of his death nothing is recorded — like Vālmīki at the start of this book, the poet vanishes into the poem.

The Great Work

The Bodhicaryāvatāra is a poem of just over nine hundred Sanskrit verses in ten chapters — an evening's recitation, a lifetime's practice. Its subject is bodhicitta, "the mind of awakening": the moment a person resolves not merely to escape suffering but to end it for every being there is, and everything that follows from taking that resolve seriously. It is simultaneously a devotional poem, a practical manual and a work of rigorous philosophy, and it is written throughout in the first person — a man talking to himself, coaxing, scolding, arguing himself into goodness — which is why readers across twelve centuries have felt it was written about them.

The recitation, finished. First, the legend at full power, as Butön and Tāranātha tell it. Śāntideva recited from the high seat through nine chapters, the assembly's contempt curdling into awe. Then he reached the ninth chapter — wisdom — and its thirty-fourth verse: when neither something nor nothing any longer stands before the mind, then, having no object left to grasp, the mind grows utterly still. And on that verse, precisely where the poem lets go of every foothold, the reciter let go of his: he rose from the throne into the air, higher and higher — until, the tellings say, he vanished entirely, and the remaining chapter and a half came down out of an empty sky, the voice finishing what the body no longer needed to. Label it plainly: this is hagiography, written down half a millennium later — and it is also a perfect piece of literary criticism, the story of a text so true to emptiness that its author evaporated at the moment of maximum meaning. Now the sober coda, which is nearly as good. The traditions record that after he vanished, the monks could not agree on what they had heard: some remembered a poem of about seven hundred verses in nine chapters; others, a thousand in ten. Emissaries tracked Śāntideva down in the south; he ruled for the longer version, and told them his other works lay hidden in the rafters of his old cell. For centuries that read as pious embroidery. Then, in the caves of Dunhuang on the Silk Road, scholars found early Tibetan manuscripts of the poem — about seven hundred verses, in nine chapters, credited to one "Akṣayamati" — and Akira Saito's studies in the 1990s confirmed that the canonical text really is an enlarged recension of a shorter original. The legend of the disputed verses remembers a real textual history: the argument the monks have in the story is the argument philologists are still having. Whether the enlarger was Śāntideva himself, revising, no one can prove.

A ladder of ten chapters. The arc is worth walking, because the poem's order is its teaching. Chapter 1 praises bodhicitta itself — how strange and precious it is that concern for all beings should flare up at all in creatures like us: as on a black night dark with cloud, a flash of lightning for one instant shows all things clear — so, by the Buddhas' power, a thought of merit rises in the world, rare and brief (1.5, our rendering). Chapters 2 and 3 clear the ground the way confession does in any tradition: the poet lays out his faults without flinching, then deliberately rejoices in every good deed anyone anywhere has ever done — envy's exact antidote — and takes the vow, in verses Indian Buddhists still chant: may I be medicine for the sick and the physician too; a bridge, a boat, a ship for everyone who needs to cross. Chapters 4 and 5 guard the new resolve with vigilance, and contain the poem's most quoted practical image (5.13): to walk the earth barefoot you could try to carpet the world in leather — or just put on shoes. You cannot restrain everything outside you; restrain the one mind you control, and it is as if the whole world were restrained. Chapters 6 through 8 take the great disciplines in turn — patience, vigour, meditation — and hold the arguments that made the poem immortal, so they get their own headings below. Chapter 9 is wisdom; chapter 10, the giving-away.

Patience: a therapy for anger. Chapter 6 is the most sustained attack on anger in ancient literature — 134 verses of a man systematically talking himself out of the most defensible emotion there is. The stakes are set at once, in verses we can quote in L. D. Barnett's public-domain 1909 rendering: "All the righteousness, the charity, the worship of the Blessed, that have been wrought in thousands of æons, are destroyed by ill-will" — one hour of hatred burns down years of goodness, a claim any veteran of one catastrophic email will find empirically plausible. Then comes the poem's most famous fork, the verse (6.10) that reads like a modern therapist wrote it: "What profits discontent if there is a remedy; and what profits it if there is none?" If the problem can be fixed, fix it — why be miserable? If it cannot be, misery changes nothing — why be miserable? Distress is never doing the work you feel it is doing. From there Śāntideva dismantles anger's logic piece by piece: people who wrong you are driven by causes and afflictions they did not choose, so raging at them is like raging at fire for being hot, or at the stick that struck you rather than the hand that swung it. And then the argument turns astonishing. Patience, he observes, is among the highest virtues — and it can only be practised on someone who wrongs you. Therefore your enemy is not an obstacle to your practice but its rarest ingredient: a benefactor arrived free of charge and, unlike your friends, in limitless supply. Barnett again: "this fruit of my patience is won by me and by him together; to him must be given the first share, for he is the cause of my patience." Nowhere else in world literature is the person who cut you off in traffic promoted quite so high.

The ownerless pain. Chapter 8, on meditation, contains the argument this chapter exists to teach — the reason philosophers now rank a medieval devotional poem among the great works of moral reasoning. Śāntideva sets out to demolish the wall between self and other, and he does it in two moves. The first is the equality of self and other (8.90–96): I should dispel the suffering of others, he argues, simply because it is suffering, like my own suffering — and if happiness matters, mine and everyone else's matter alike, so "what is so special about me, that I strive after happiness for myself alone?" The obvious retort — their pain doesn't hurt me — he meets head-on: your future self's pain doesn't hurt your present self either, yet you save for old age; your hand feels nothing of your foot's pain, yet it reaches down to help. The boundaries you treat as morally decisive are conventions. Then comes the second, deeper move (8.101–103), the ownerless-pain argument, built on the Buddhist analysis of the self. What you call a "person" is a stream of momentary mental states — like a line of people, which is not a thing over and above the people in it — riding a bundle of physical parts, like an army, which is not a thing over and above its soldiers. (The similes are Śāntideva's own; Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton's standard translation renders them "like a queue... like an army.") If no owner of suffering can survive this analysis, then in the final reckoning there is no whose about pain at all — there is just pain, arising, needing to stop. "It is suffering; therefore it is to be prevented" — and no line can be drawn around "mine." Selfishness is not wicked so much as confused: a filing error about where you end. And because Śāntideva never argues without practising, the chapter closes with parātmaparivartana, the exchange of self and other: a meditation in which you deliberately occupy another's position — the beggar looking up at you, the rival looking across at you — until envy, competitiveness and pride have all been experienced from the receiving end. Out of this exercise Tibet would later build tonglen, the practice of breathing in others' pain and breathing out relief. Now the careful paragraph the claim in this chapter's opening deserves. The philosopher Charles Goodman has argued that Śāntideva states, a thousand years before Jeremy Bentham, the core of what the West calls utilitarianism — that what matters morally is the welfare of all sentient beings, impartially counted — and as an anticipation it is genuinely stunning: the impartial standpoint, derived by argument, in the 8th century. But anticipation is not identity, and scholars such as Paul Williams and Stephen Harris push back hard: Śāntideva never proposes maximizing aggregate happiness for its own sake, never weighs trolley-style trade-offs, and frames everything within karma, rebirth and the cultivation of virtue; his conclusion is not a policy formula but a person — the bodhisattva. Fairest verdict: he reached the impartial heart of utilitarian ethics by his own road, centuries early, while wanting something different from it — not the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but the extinction of the boundary that makes "greatest number" feel like other people.

The wisdom chapter and the gift at the end. Chapter 9 is Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka — the "middle way" philosophy of śūnyatā, emptiness, which holds that nothing whatever possesses independent, self-standing existence — condensed into verse and staged as a running debate with every rival school in the Nālandā curriculum. It opens by distinguishing the two truths on which the whole system runs: the conventional truth of the everyday world, where tables and taxes and persons are perfectly real and rules apply, and the ultimate truth, which no concept reaches — "the ultimate is not an object the intellect can grasp; the intellect is itself the conventional" (9.2, our rendering). Emptiness, Śāntideva insists, is not nihilism but the final solvent of clinging — and, crucially, the ally of compassion, since a self seen through is a self no longer defended at others' expense. This is the chapter on whose thirty-fourth verse the legend lifted him off the throne, and one can see why the tradition chose it. Then, having scaled philosophy's last ridge, the poem does the most characteristic thing it ever does: it turns around and gives everything away. Chapter 10 is pure dedication — every atom of merit the work has earned, transferred to others, in a cascade of wishes for the hell-beings, the hungry, the lost, the frightened — cresting in the verse at the head of this chapter, the one His Holiness the Dalai Lama recited to close his 1989 Nobel Peace Prize lecture: as long as space endures, as long as beings remain, may I too remain, to drive away the sorrows of the world.

The other book: the accidental archive. The recitation legend paints an inspired improviser; Śāntideva's second surviving work reveals the scholar underneath. The Śikṣāsamuccaya — "Compendium of Training" — is an anthology: twenty-seven root verses of his own, expanded through nineteen chapters built almost entirely of quotations, carefully chosen and ordered, from more than a hundred Mahāyāna sūtras (discourses attributed to the Buddha), the reading list of a man who had evidently absorbed Nālandā's nine-storey library while his classmates thought he was asleep. And it became, by pure accident, one of Indian Buddhism's arks. When the tradition died in India, most of its Sanskrit library died with it; for dozens of those sūtras, the passages Śāntideva copied out are all the original Sanskrit that survives anywhere on earth. The idler of Nālandā turned out to be its most consequential note-taker. (A third work he is credited with, the Sūtrasamuccaya, is lost or absorbed; and one tantric tradition counts him — as "Bhusuku" — among the eighty-four mahāsiddhas, the wonder-working adepts, even crediting songs in early Bengali to his name. The identification is late and doubted; it mostly proves that everyone wanted him.)

Before & After

Backward, Śāntideva is the confluence of this book's whole Mahāyāna arc. His ninth chapter is Nāgārjuna (chapter 50) set to poetry — the Madhyamaka dialectic, five centuries on, still the sharpest instrument in the box. His ladder of chapters versifies the bodhisattva path that Asaṅga and Vasubandhu (chapter 53) had systematized into scholastic architecture. His debating reflexes — the objector's voice forever breaking into the verse — are the debate culture built by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti (chapter 66), whose Nālandā is the very stage of his legend; and the university itself last appeared in this book being threatened with demolition by Bhāskaravarman (chapter 75), whose era closed with its walls intact and its dormitories, evidently, sheltering at least one spectacular underachiever. Behind them all stands Aśvaghoṣa (chapter 46), the first monk to decide that Buddhist truth deserved great Sanskrit poetry — Śāntideva is his last and greatest heir. The global rhyme is double: backward to the Stoics — Seneca's treatise on anger and Marcus Aurelius's self-addressed exercises read like chapter 6's Roman cousins, therapy-by-argument against the passions — and forward to Bentham, as weighed above.

Forward, the road forks — and the fork is the story of Buddhism itself. In India, Śāntideva stands near the end of the line: this is, quietly, the last chapter this book will devote to a major Indian Buddhist thinker. The Pāla emperors of Bengal and Bihar would fund the tradition's silver age — founding Vikramaśīla around 800 CE as Nālandā's twin — but the current was ebbing, and around 1200 the Turkic raids that destroyed both universities ended institutional Buddhism in the land of its birth. The tradition's future lay across the Himalaya. The Bodhicaryāvatāra entered Tibetan within a few generations of its author's death; Atiśa (chapter 88), the Vikramaśīla master who re-founded Tibetan Buddhism in the 11th century, carried its practice-lineage north, and from his school grew lojong, "mind training," whose slogans and exchange meditations are the poem's eighth chapter made into a curriculum. Tsongkhapa, founder of the Geluk order, wove the poem through his syntheses; every Tibetan school claims it; the present Dalai Lama has taught it for decades on every continent. A poem recited once at Nālandā became the daily bread of a civilization its author never saw.

Why It Still Matters

Start with the witness who matters most. "If I have any understanding of compassion and the practice of the bodhisattva path," the 14th Dalai Lama has said, "it is entirely on the basis of this text that I possess it." He has called the Bodhicaryāvatāra his highest inspiration, taught it on every continent, and ended the most watched speech of his life — the Nobel lecture — with verse 10.55. When the world's most recognizable Buddhist repeatedly credits one 8th-century Indian poem with whatever goodness he has, the poem is not a relic; it is infrastructure.

It is also, verse for verse, the most practically useful thing this era of the book will produce. The remediable-irremediable fork is now a commonplace of cognitive therapy, usually taught with no idea of its source; the enemy-as-trainer reframe turns up in sports psychology and negotiation seminars; the leather-and-shoes verse is quoted by people who could not name a single Buddhist text. Pema Chödrön's commentaries and the Padmakara Translation Group's The Way of the Bodhisattva have made it a bestseller in the West, and academic philosophy has caught up: journals argue "Śāntideva and consequentialism" in earnest, and philosophers around the effective-altruism movement, asking how much the comfortable owe the distant suffering, now engage Buddhist ethics in exactly his line. The ownerless-pain argument remains live ammunition — some think it proves too much, some that it proves everything — but nobody has retired it.

And there is the human fact of the story itself, which needs no doctrine. Every institution has a Bhusuku: the colleague written off, the student whose work is invisible because it happens where evaluations don't look. Nālandā — the finest assessment system of its age — examined a man daily for years and measured only his naps. India's Buddhist twilight was near; the universities would burn; and yet the idler's night-work outlived them all — carried over the mountains, chanted for twelve centuries, quoted in Oslo. Eating, sleeping, strolling; and, unseen, building something for as long as space endures.

Over to You

Śāntideva argues that the line between your pain and a stranger's is a convention, like the line between your present and future selves. If you genuinely believed pain has no owner, what would change on Monday — your giving, your grudges, your ambitions? And if nothing would change, do you actually believe your objections to him?

The remediable-irremediable fork says distress is never useful. But is a world without moral anguish desirable? Is there suffering — grief, outrage at injustice — that we ought to feel even when it fixes nothing?

The monks' cruelty produced the masterpiece: no humiliation plot, no high seat, no poem. Does the outcome redeem the ambush? What do we owe the tormentors whose provocation revealed what encouragement never found?

Goodman calls him utilitarianism's ancestor; his defenders reply that he wanted saints, not spreadsheets. When an ancient thinker "anticipates" a modern idea, who is being honoured — the ancient, the modern, or the person making the comparison?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: The Bodhicaryāvatāra, translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford World's Classics, 1995) — the standard scholarly version, compact and exact; or the Padmakara Translation Group's more lyrical The Way of the Bodhisattva (Shambhala). Reading it feels like being talked to, urgently, by someone who assumes you are capable of goodness. Free online, L. D. Barnett's abridged 1909 The Path of Light is public domain and still lovely.

A modern way in: Pema Chödrön's No Time to Lose (2005), a warm verse-by-verse commentary for complete beginners; or the Dalai Lama's own For the Benefit of All Beings, his teachings on the poem — the master text explained by its most famous student.

The thread forward: As Buddhism's Indian sun begins to set, its greatest Hindu opponent is being born — by tradition on the Kerala coast, to die at thirty-two having reorganized Hindu thought from end to end. And with him, a promise this book made sixty-three chapters ago falls due: the fig seed Uddālaka split for his son in chapter 13, and the sentence tat tvam asi — "that thou art" — now meets the man who built a whole philosophy on it. Chapter 77: Ādi Śaṅkara, the pivot of the age.