No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
The works of Śāntideva, the Śikṣāsamuccaya and the Bodhicaryāvatāra, concern ethical issues and their relationship to Madhyamaka philosophical views. Śāntideva's Śikṣāsamuccaya focuses on the first five of the six perfections, whereas the sixth is treated in greater detail in the Bodhicaryāvatāra. "The sophistication, generality, and power of Śāntideva's arguments," Charles Goodman writes, "give him a legitimate claim to be the greatest of all Buddhist ethicists."[101] Śāntideva's arguments against Buddhist and non-Buddhist opponents in the sixth chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra do not differ significantly from those of Candrakīrti in the Madhyamakāvatāra and his other works. Śāntideva reaffirms (BCA IX.2-5) the Madhyamaka distinction between
conventional and ultimate truth and the distinction between the experiences of ordinary people and yogins. Ultimate reality is inaccessible to ordinary functioning of the intellect, which operates only at the level of conventional truth. The meditative experience of yogins who realize the empty and interdependent nature of things, supersedes the faulty perceptions of ordinary people, who believe in the reality of the illusions they see. As Michael Sweet notes below in his summary of the Bodhicaryāvatāra's ninth chapter, Śāntideva utilizes similar reductio ad absurdum arguments (prasaṅga) against Sāṃkhya views of causality and Yogācāra claims about the mind's true existence and the assertion that mind is conscious of itself (svasaṃvedana). (Lang, "Śāntideva," 137)
Notes
101. Charles Goodman, "Consequentialism, agent-neutrality, and Mahayana ethics", PEW 58.1, 2008, p. 21.
