Bodhicaryavatara

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.

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.