Taming Śāntideva: Tsongkhapa's Use of the Bodhicaryāvatāra

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

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As Jonathan Gold points out in his introduction to this volume, Śāntideva's Guide is a "classic," a text that speaks so deeply to common human concerns that it can resonate with people born into cultures far removed in time and space from that of the author. A classic is, in short, "universal"—or nearly so. For all our human commonalities and interconnections, however, even in the twenty-first century we live in a profoundly plural world, so to be truly meaningful in a wide variety of settings, hence fulfill the definition of a "classic," a text must not only achieve excellence of form and content and touch on "timeless" questions but also be, in the language of theologian David Tracy, plural and ambiguous.[1] That is, it must overflow with possible meanings and uses, while avoiding any straightforward statement as to which of these meanings and uses is definitive or final. It is safe to say that religious texts such as the Bible, the Qur'ān, and the Bhagavad Gītā, or the literary works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Rumi, would never have become classics had they been open only to a single interpretation; it is precisely because they are plural and ambiguous that they could appeal to people in various times and places. Put another way, a classic is a "wild" text, resistant to domestication, impossible to fully subdue or contain. Yet to be human is to seek to tame the wild, whether encountered as natural forces, our fellow creatures,or the intractable meanings we seek to wrest from the world.
As a classic, the Guide is plural, ambiguous—and "wild." It is plural because it may be read as a ritual manual, a guide to meditation, an inquiry into ethics, a treatise on metaphysics, a psychological self-interrogation, a great devotional poem—or all of the above. It is ambiguous because its precise meaning, especially in its philosophical passages, was debated for centuries in India, for a millennium (and counting) among Tibetans, and now is contested by academics and Buddhist practitioners in the West. And it is, uncontestably, wild. Granted, it is systematic to a degree, more or less following the course of a bodhisattva's training as crystallized in the six perfections (pāramitā). Just as often, however, it is marked by Śāntideva's improvisational approach to the topics that interest him, as shown, for instance, in the way he will proffer one set of meditative reflections, then suggest a different tack, and another—not in an attempt to establish a rigid contemplative sequence but to provide himself and the reader with a set of possibilities, at least one of which is bound to be effective. In this way, the Guide is resistant to highly ramified commentary—yet that is precisely the treatment it has received from scholastic traditions, especially in Tibet, where for a thousand years or more it has shaped understanding of what it means to be a bodhisattva, working toward full awakening for the sake of all beings. Despite the Guide's occasional unruliness, its sheer poetic, philosophical, and psychological brilliance—not to mention its influence in India—made it impossible to ignore, so scholastics within the developing monastic orders of second-millennium Tibet set out to "tame" it, to routinize its charisma, by bringing it under their intellectual and institutional control.[2]
This chapter will examine one such attempt to tame the Guide, that of Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa, 1357-1417), the forefather of the Geluk (dge lugs) order of Tibetan Buddhism, the monastic lineage that would give Tibet the institution of the Dalai Lamas and dominate Tibetan politics from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Tsongkhapa was one of the most influential figures in Tibetan Buddhist history, at once a visionary mystic, a brilliant and controversial philosopher, a dogged monastic reformer, and a founder of religious institutions that have lasted down to the present day. Our primary focus will be on Tsongkhapa's treatment of the Guide in his 1402 magnum opus, The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Awakening (Byang chub lam rim chen mo),[3] but we also will cast a backward glance at Indian and Tibetan thinkers preceding him and touch on developments in Geluk tradition after his time. (Jackson, preliminary remarks, 162–63)

Notes

See Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity.
For a thoughtful collection of reflections on the theory and practice of scholasticism, see Cabezon, ed., Scholasticism, of special note are Cabezon's introduction (1-17) and the essay by Paul Griffiths ("Scholasticism: The Possible Recovery of an Intellectual Practice," 201-235).
Tibetan edition: Tsong kha pa, sKyes bu gsum gyi rnyams su blang ba'i rim pa thams cad tshang bar ston pa'i byang chub lam gyi rim pa/ Byang chub lam rim che ba; English translation: Tsong-kha-pa, The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, trans. Lamrim Chenmo Translation Committee. For a helpful gloss on the Great Treatise, see Yangsi Rinpoche, Practicing the Path. For background on the stages of the path, see David Seyfort Ruegg's introduction to Tsong-kha-pa, Great Treatise, vol. 1, 17-32.

Citation

Jackson, Roger. "Taming Śāntideva: Tsongkhapa's Use of the Bodhicaryāvatāra." In Readings of Śāntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice, edited by Jonathan C. Gold and Douglas S. Duckworth, 162–79. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Interconnections

Works related to this item

1 Chapter or part of

Gold, Jonathan C., and Douglas S. Duckworth, eds. Readings of Śāntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Books2019About this item

This book serves as a companion to the Bodhicaryāvatāra. The fifteen essays contained here illuminate the Guide's many philosophical, literary, ritual, and ethical dimensions.

2 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.

Tsong kha pa (ཙོང་ཁ་པ་). lam rim chen mo [ལམ་རིམ་ཆེན་མོ།]. [The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment].

Classical WorksAbout this item

Lam rim chen mo. In Tibetan, "Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path"; the abbreviated title for one of the best-known works on Buddhist thought and practice in Tibet, composed by the Tibetan luminary Tsong khapa Blo bzang Grags pa in 1402 at the central Tibetan monastery of Rwa sgreng. A lengthy treatise belonging to the lam rim, or stages of the path, genre of Tibetan Buddhist literature, the Lam rim chen mo takes its inspiration from numerous earlier writings, most notably the Bodhipathapradīpa ("Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment") by the eleventh-century Bengali master Atiśa Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna. It is the most extensive treatment of three principal stages that Tsong kha pa composed. The others include (1) the Lam rim chung ba ("Short Treatise on the Stages of the Path"), also called the Lam rim 'bring ba ('"Intermediate Treatise on the States of the Path") and (2) the Lam rim bsdus don ("Concise Meaning of the Stages of the Path"), occasionally also referred to as the Lam rim chung ngu ("Brief Stages of the Path"). The latter text, which records Tsong kha pa's own realization of the path in verse form, is also referred to as the Lam rim nyams mgur ma ("Song of Experience of the Stages of the Path"). The Lam rim chen mo is a highly detailed and often technical treatise presenting a comprehensive and synthetic overview of the path to buddhahood. It draws, often at length, upon a wide range of scriptural sources including the Sūtra and śāstra literature of both the hīnayāna and Mahāyāna; Tsong kha pa treats tantric practice in a separate work. The text is organized under the rubric of the three levels of spiritual predilection, personified as "the three individuals" (skyes bu gsum): the beings of small capacity, who engage in religious practice in order to gain a favorable rebirth in their next lifetime; the beings of intermediate capacity, who seek liberation from rebirth for themselves as an arhat; and the beings of great capacity, who seek to liberate all beings in the universe from suffering and thus follow the bodhisattva path to buddhahood. Tsong kha pa's text does not lay out all the practices of these three types of persons but rather those practices essential to the bodhisattva path that are held in common by persons of small and intermediate capacity, such as the practice of refuge (śaraṇa) and contemplation of the uncertainty of the time of death. The text includes extended discussions of topics such as relying on a spiritual master, the development of bodhicitta, and the six perfections (pāramitā). The last section of the text, sometimes regarded as a separate work, deals at length with the nature of serenity (śamatha) and insight (vipaśyanā); Tsong kha pa's discussion of insight here represents one of his most important expositions of emptiness (śūnyatā). Primarily devoted to exoteric Mahāyāna doctrine, the text concludes with a brief reference to Vajrayāna and the practice of tantra, a subject discussed at length by Tsong kha pa in a separate work, the Sngags rim chen mo ("Stages of the Path of Mantra"). The Lam rim chen mo's full title is Skyes bu gsum gyi rnyams su blang ba'i rim pa thams cad tshang bar ston pa'i byang chub lam gyi rim pa. (Source: "Lam rim chen mo." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 465-66. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)