The poem's design follows the life of a single intention. The opening chapters praise bodhicitta, the awakening mind, as the rarest and most precious event in the universe, a flash of lightning in a clouded night, and prepare its arising through confession, rejoicing in the good of others, and the sevenfold worship. With the vow taken, the middle chapters guard it: vigilance watches the mind like a wound in a crowd, and the celebrated chapter on patience dismantles anger with argument after argument, since an enemy who harms me is the true occasion for the virtue no friend can give me, and rage at causes and conditions is as senseless as rage at a fire for burning.
The chapter on effort turns laziness, attachment to comfort and self-contempt into objects of analysis. The eighth chapter, on meditative absorption, contains the practice for which the work is most quoted: the systematic exchange of self and other. Since all suffer alike and no one's suffering is more real than anyone else's, the borders of concern are habits, not facts, and Shantideva has the meditator practise viewing himself from the position of others, envious from below, rivalrous from beside, proud from above, until self-preference loses its footing. The ninth chapter compresses Madhyamaka philosophy into debate verses on emptiness, and the tenth gives everything away, dedicating the poem's merit to every being in every world.