Beautiful Loser: Shantideva & The Way of the Bodhisattva

Journal Article

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

It has been nearly thirty-five years since I first opened The Way of the Bodhisattva, and revisiting it now at the behest of Inquiring Mind fills me with a renewed appreciation for the vitality and breadth of the text. What appeared to me all those years ago as a beautiful but lofty and distant map of the bodhisattva path now feels deeply personal, subtle and provocative. Indeed, part of what draws me close to the work is a powerfully empathetic connection to the book’s author, Shantideva, who lived in the great monastic university of Nalanda in eighth-century India. Although we recognize him today for his great scholarship and deep wisdom, what immediately ignites my interest is that Shantideva was considered by his contemporaries to be a loser.

Scholarly presentation about

Bodhicaryāvatāra

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.

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