Tradition remembers Shantideva as a prince of the south who renounced his throne on the eve of coronation, became a monk at the university-monastery of Nalanda, and was despised there as one who did nothing but eat, sleep and wander. The community, meaning to shame him, invited him to recite scripture before the assembly, and he asked whether they wished to hear something old or something new.
The Bodhicaryavatara was his answer, delivered from memory; at the ninth chapter's verses on emptiness, the legend says, he rose into the air and vanished from sight, the recitation continuing from the sky. Retrieved afterwards from his abandoned cell were two further works, the Shikshasamuccaya, an anthology of sutra passages on the bodhisattva's training that he cites within the poem, and the lost Sutrasamuccaya. Hagiography aside, the poem is datable to the eighth century and travelled quickly: it was translated into Tibetan in the imperial period and repeatedly revised, and it became a root text of the mind-training traditions of Tibet, its verses on exchanging self and other providing the doctrinal basis for the practices of giving and taking.
Commentaries accumulated in India and Tibet, the Nyingma master Patrul Rinpoche championed its teaching across nineteenth-century Kham, and the fourteenth Dalai Lama has called it his principal inspiration on compassion, teaching it worldwide. Sanskrit manuscripts survive, and the poem is read today in dozens of languages.