Śāntideva and an Ethic of Radical Compassion

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:

Śāntideva lived nearly three centuries after Buddhaghosa and in a very different philosophical context. As in the case of Buddhaghosa, much of what we know about his life is shrouded in legend. But it is clear that Śāntideva was a major exponent of the Madhyamaka school, which was one philosophical tradition within the larger movement of the Mahayana that had by his day become well established in north India. He studied and composed his work at Nālandā University, perhaps the largest university in the world at the time, and his work has proved highly influential in Tibetan Buddhism.
      Several features of the Mahayana movement must be noted at the outset to make sense of Śāntideva’s project. The Mahayana was not a school of Buddhism, but rather a series of interventions and innovations that shifted points of emphasis, orientation, and aspiration; these interventions can be traced historically to apocryphal scriptures (sutras), such as the Perfection of Wisdom sutras that emerged around the first century of the Common Era, and eventually developed into a copious literature of Mahayana texts that in some cases came to have devotional followings. (We should note that the linguistic world at this point is Sanskrit, as we shift away from the scriptural and commentarial corpus in Pali, the language of the Theravada, which was little used in India at this time.) The new scriptures did not entirely supplant the earlier canons among the adherents of Mahayana ideas, but they were given higher status, and the earlier bodies of material (and those who would limit textual authority to them) were sometimes cast in highly polemical terms. In addition, the work of the second century CE philosopher Nāgārjuna on emptiness in this early period was also crucial for the philosophical development of the Mahayana in the forms it took thereafter, including the transmissions of Buddhism to China and the rest of East Asia, and, later, to Tibet.
      The two most important innovations of the Mahayana involved the development of the bodhisattva ideal, especially its emphasis on universal compassion, and the foregrounding of philosophical ideas about emptiness. Both are central to Śāntideva’s thought. We can consider the bodhisattva ideal first. In "mainstream" Buddhism (what modern scholars call the non-Mahayana systems of Indian Buddhism, which can include the Theravada), the Buddha was held to be a moral exemplar and teacher of the path to liberation. His long journey to buddhahood that took innumerable previous lives to achieve is instructive, awe-inspiring, and highly valued, but was not generally considered something ordinary people could emulate (instead, practitioners seek to become arhats, liberated persons who are not at the level of buddhas). During his previous lives practicing the perfections prerequisite for his discovering and teaching the Buddhist truths and path, he was called a "bodhisattva" (Pali, bodhisatta), that is, a buddha-in-training. In a departure from these views, the early Mahayana scriptures begin to suggest that the Buddha's life, including his long path as a bodhisattva, could be followed more widely, and they came to promote this path for all practitioners.
      What makes the bodhisattva path notable is that it was not concerned solely with liberation, or release from the suffering of rebirth, karma, and removing the toxic defilements, as is the arhat path of purification and soteriological freedom articulated by Buddhaghosa. All agree that what the Buddha achieved was not only this, but also the capacity to discover the truths in the first place, to teach them, and thus to save others.[14] The goal of a bodhisattva is to achieve the perfections that fostered the discovery of the truths and the practices that can release people from suffering in samsara (for Śāntideva there are six perfections to the Theravada's ten: generosity, morality, forbearance, vigor, meditation, and understanding). When becoming a buddha is the goal (rather than becoming 'just; an arhat free of samsara), then the perfections, and above all the compassion that fundamentally characterizes this higher goal, become the path. Further, the path becomes much longer: Although becoming an arhat is at least conceivable in one lifetime, the path of the bodhisattva, modeled on the Buddha's countless past lives of striving for ethical and spiritual perfection, becomes considerably protracted. As a Mahayana thinker, Śāntideva aims not at the path of purification to achieve individual liberation of an arhat (as in the case of Buddhaghosa), but at this much grander and exalted ideal of saving all beings. Thus, as we consider Śāntideva's ethical thought, we will be concerned with questions of altruism and universal compassion, and challenging issues of self-sacrifice and radically altruistic ethical ideals that are constitutive of this higher vision.
      The second major innovation of the Mahayana is the development of emptiness teachings, as we have already begun to describe. As we have seen, emptiness was not unknown to the Theravada. Buddhaghosa uses emptiness as a practice to break down not only persons but also the phenomena that constitute them; it is a mode of contemplative and analytical practice, among others, for understanding and liberation. But in the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras and in Nāgārjuna's philosophical work, emptiness becomes a fundamental philosophical stance, and Nāgārjuna initially (and Śāntideva six centuries later) deploys epistemological argumentation to establish an understanding of all phenomena as conditioned and conditioning and thus "empty" of inherent, self-contained, independent essences. Madhyamaka philosophers argued against north Indian Abhidharma traditions that they interpreted as positing an ontology of ultimate reality, and Śāntideva is building on a long history of formal metaphysical and epistemological reasoning to dismantle such metaphysical views. Traditional and modern scholars alike argue about whether the outcome of this philosophical work results in a position about ultimate reality – that all things are empty – or whether it, at the end of the day, dismantles all such positions including emptiness itself.
      By the time of the mature Madhyamaka of the eighth century – Śāntideva’s moment – philosophical debate about metaphysical questions had become highly advanced. Also robust was philosophical development in logic and epistemology as Buddhists of various stripes at Nālandā university debated with one another and non-Buddhist interlocutors; advances in what we would call Hindu philosophical systems were equally rigorous, and the debates between many different systems were critical to the sophistication of the entire classical Indian philosophical tradition. This situation contrasts quite sharply with Buddhaghosa, who was either innocent of these philosophical developments in India in his day or saw his project as an Analyst as fundamentally different in nature and in scope. (Heim, "Śāntideva and an Ethic of Radical Compassion," 36–38)

Notes

14. Actually, it was not really "in the first place": Buddhist teachings claim that there were innumerable buddhas before our Buddha who discovered and taught the truths, but that their dispensations had been forgotten and our Buddha rediscovered and taught them. His dispensation will also someday be lost and will be rediscovered by a future buddha.

Citation

Heim, Maria. "Śāntideva and an Ethic of Radical Compassion." Chap. 3 in Buddhist Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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Works related to this item

1 Scholarship on

Śāntideva (ཞི་བ་ལྷ་). Bodhicaryāvatāra [बोधिचर्यावतार]. byang chub sems dpa'i spyod pa la 'jug pa [བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས་དཔའི་སྤྱོད་པ་ལ་འཇུག་པ།]. [The Way of the Bodhisattva]. Tengyur, RKTST 3216 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3216&typ=2.

Classical WorksAbout this item

An "Introduction to Bodhisattva Practice," the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is a poem about the path of a bodhisattva, in ten chapters, written by the Indian Buddhist Śāntideva (fl. c. 685–763). One of the masterpieces of world literature, it is a core text of Mahāyāna Buddhism and continues to be taught, studied, and commented upon in many languages and by many traditions around the world. The main subject of the text is bodhicitta, the altruistic aspiration for enlightenment, and the path and practices of the bodhisattva, the six perfections (pāramitās). The text forms the basis of many contemporary discussions of Buddhist ethics and philosophy.