Sāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, Chapter 8 (verses 89-140)
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- A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
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- A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life (1999)
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- Appendix B: Excerpt from A Lamp Completely Illuminating the Profound Reality of Interdependence
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- Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way Of Life: An Oral Explanation of Chapter 6
- Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way Of Life: An Oral Explanation of Chapter 7
- Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way Of Life: An Oral Explanation of Chapter 8
- Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life: An Oral Explanation of Chapter 1
- Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life: An Oral Explanation of Chapter 2
- Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life: An Oral Explanation of Chapter 3
- Stoics and Bodhisattvas: Spiritual Exercise and Faith in Two Philosophical Traditions
- Studies in the Philosophy of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (2000)
- Sur l'océan du Mahayana
- Sāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, Chapter 8 (verses 89-140)
- The Awakening Mind (Tsering 2008)
- The Beautiful Way of Life
- The Bodhisattva Guide
- The Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra
- The Center of the Sunlit Sky
- The Concept of Bodhicitta in Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara
- The Concept of Bodhicitta in Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra (Diss)
- The Concept of Bodhicitta in Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra-Review by Edelglass
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- The Profound Reality of Interdependence
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- The Reflexive Nature of Awareness (1998)
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- The Way of Awakening
- The Way of the Bodhisattva (1997)
- The Way of the Bodhisattva (2006)
- The Wisdom Chapter
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- Uncommon Happiness
- Wisdom: Two Buddhist Commentaries
- Śāntideva (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Śāntideva's Philosophy as Expressed in the Early Version of His Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, Chapter 8
Description
In recent years, Buddhism has won many converts in the West. It appears to offer a perspective which is at once religious and free from the theistic notion, unacceptable to many modern minds, of a personal creator-God. But its attraction owes, as well, to a moral doctrine of universal compassion that knows no boundaries of nation, class, sex or even species. The exhortation 'whatever living beings there be: feeble or strong . . . seen or unseen . . . far or near . . . may all beings be happy![1] seems more congenial to the modern sensibility than the Gita's call (see chapter 6 above) to performance of duties, military ones included, for their own sake.
The importance of compassion and 'loving-kindness' seems to be implied by the first of the 'four noble truths' announced by Gotama, the Buddha, in the sixth or fifth century BCE — that life is 'suffering', 'sorrow', 'dis-ease', 'unsatisfactoriness' (just some of the suggested translations of the Pali word dukkha). But other Buddhist doctrines make it problematic as to why and how moral concern should have a central role. The other noble truths suggest that it is essentially through understanding and wisdom that 'suffering' is to be overcome — through, above all, recognizing that the desires or 'cravings' which are responsible for 'suffering' are due to a mistaken 'clinging' to a non-existent 'self'. Morality, it can seem, is at most a useful preparation for that 'renunciation' of self-centred desire which is a prerequisite for entry into the enlightened condition of nirvana ('extinction'). Moreover, one is bound to ask, if this 'extinction', this release from the round of rebirth, is the proper goal, why should one care too much about improving conditions for creatures still caught up in this process? Anyway, if a person is 'not-self, but perhaps merely a bundle of passing mental states without any centre of identity, to whom exactly are compassion and loving-kindness directed?
It is unsurprising, therefore, that some commentators, such as Max Weber and Albert Schweitzer, have regarded Buddhism as a 'cold', amoral religion—and certainly in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, the emphasis has tended to be upon renunciation and asceticism rather than moral action.[2] But in the Mahayana ('Great Vehicle') tradition which arose in opposition to the earlier one, a central tenet is that of universal compassion, understood as a loving commitment to help all creatures escape from 'suffering'. The pledge of the bodhisattva ('the being of enlightenment'), who postpones his or her attainment of nirvana, is 'However numerous are the sentient beings that exist, I vow to save them all!'.[3]
While there are many moral 'manuals' in the Buddhist literature, edifying precepts enjoining temperance, charity, friendship and so on, there is a dearth of sustained discussion attempting to reconcile the importance of morality with the doctrines mentioned above. In my two selections—both from the Mahayana tradition—one discerns, however, arguments for universal compassion compatible with, or even grounded in, those doctrines. In his commentary on the poem Three Principal Paths by the most famous Buddhist philosopher of Tibet, Tsongkapa (1357-1419), the monk and university teacher Pabongka Rinpoche (1878-1941} mentions two methods of 'training one's mind' for aiming at 'saving' all creatures—the 'seven-part, cause-and-effect instruction' and 'exchanging self and others'. It is the former which he adumbrates, the latter being the main theme in my selection from the eighth-century CE Indian monk Śāntideva's 'Guide to the Buddhist Path to Awakening', 'one of the great spiritual poems of mankind'[4] and a text especially influential in Tibetan Buddhism. Although both authors speak of 'methods' for inducing a compassionate attitude, we
might instead think of these as arguments for why one ought to adopt such an attitude.
The two 'methods' or arguments are, I think, fairly self-explanatory: both aim to cultivate a 'selfless' or 'neutral' attitude towards ourselves and others. In the Tibetan text, the argument is based on our relationships with other people in past and future lives. This raises the question of the relevance of such arguments to those non-Buddhists who are unable to accept the doctrine of rebirth. I invite readers to try amending the arguments, to treat them as grounded in reflections not on how we actually were and will be related to other people in past and future lives, but on how we might have been related to them in this one. Instead, for example, of reflecting, like Tsongkapa, that this woman, whom I may be treating badly, was my mother in a previous life, reflect on the facts that she might have been my mother in this one and that she probably is the mother of someone who might have been my best friend.
A residual worry may be that, for all the talk of selfless compassion, the motive for it remains a selfish one—ensuring nirvana for oneself. But, as a great commentator pointed out, 'if a Buddhist undergoes the discipline that leads to nirvana . . . it is in order to diminish by one the number of living and suffering beings'.[5] In other words, someone with a selfless or neutral attitude will regard his own future lives as just one more series of 'bundles of suffering', no more, but no less, deserving of compassion than any other. Moreover, as Śāntideva reminds us (e.g. verse 98), the doctrine of 'not-self' entails that these future lives are not in any substantial sense 'mine', but only loosely continuous with 'my' present one, so that aiming to forestall them (by achieving nirvana) is no more egocentric than it is altruistic.[6]
Notes
- The Sutta-Nipata, London: Curzon Press, 1985, 16:4–5.
- In the authoritative Theravada treatise, Buddhaghosa's The Path of Purification, Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1991, 'virtue' is only the first stage, before 'concentration' and 'understanding', on this path. But see Steven Collins, Selfless Persons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 194f, on not exaggerating the difference between the two traditions.
- Quoted in Heinrich Dumoulin, Understanding Buddhism, New York: Weatherhill, 1994, p. 76.
- Paul Williams, Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 198.
- Louis de le Vallée Poussin, quoted in Collins, Selfless Persons, p. 193.
- For an interesting attempt by a modern Western Philosopher to explore the implications of something like the Buddhist 'not-self' doctrine, see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
