General Introduction: Śāntideva and His World

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Śāntideva's Life and Cultural World

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

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It is natural to want to know a little about the author of a great work of literature, and a work of spirituality perhaps more than most others stimulates curiosity about what the author was really like, and the inner struggles which led to his or her profundity. We want to know of the author as an individual, and in this post-Freudian world perhaps we hope to see behind the wisdom to a tortured soul. Traditionally in India—and Tibet too, where Indian Buddhist ideals were and still are so important—this search for the individual apart from the profundity, this fascination for the psychological truth, the real spiritual agony, is rather alien, and psychological truth is thought to be a matter between the pupil and his or her spiritual master, not of concern to the public. Indian and Tibetan commentators sometimes recognize an interest in the life of an author, but his life story (the author is almost always male) is told in order to show his greatness, his almost superhuman miracles and spiritual attainments, to prove that his work and teaching can be trusted to lead to spiritual depths, and, of course, to justify the commentary. Thus we learn almost nothing about the author as a psychological individual, a real person. He is a type, an example of attainment, and his life a story of prediction, visions, triumphs, and magic. Learning, for such great examples, is straightforward and easy. There are no psychological torments, for most of the learning had been completed in previous lives and the torments, if there were any, overcome aeons ago. A recurrent theme in these life stories is how the author was taken by others to be a mere ordinary person before circumstances showed that actually, usually from a very early age if not from birth, he was a Great Being of wondrous attainment.
So it is with the traditional story of Śāntideva. Even the earliest version we possess is hundreds of years later than the life of its subject, and is already a completely legendary hagiography.[1] It is quite possible that the story involves an amalgamation of two different persons, and even the claim that Śāntideva was a prince from North India who fled royal consecration for fear of implication in the evils of kingship repeats a traditional Buddhist theme and has no independent corroboration. Śāntideva is generally thought to have flourished some time between 685 and 763 CE, although the reasoning behind this dating is by no means conclusive. It is as certain as it can be, however, that Śāntideva was a Buddhist monk, who followed the Mahāyāna form of Buddhism, and it is possible if we can follow the Bodhicaryāvatāra itself that Śāntideva was particularly devoted to Mañjuśrī (or Mañjughoṣa), a 'celestial' figure who in Mahāyāna Buddhism plays a role rather like a god—or patron saint—of wisdom.[2] Śāntideva is associated with the great Buddhist monastery of Nalanda, the impressive ruins of which can still be seen in the state of Bihar in North India and bear fitting testimony to an enormous monastic university which was the pride of the Buddhist world, visited by scholar-monks and pilgrims from as far away as China. We know that Śāntideva was extremely learned. His other great work, the Śikṣā Samuccaya, consists in the main of quotations from nearly a hundred Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures (sūtras). Śāntideva must have had access to a large library—and used it. The ninth chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the difficult chapter on Wisdom, is one of the principal sources for Mahāyāna philosophy, written in the form of a complex debate which must echo the debates which took place in the refined scholastic context of Nalanda university. (Williams, introduction, vii-viii)

Notes

For a modern retelling, based on the standard Tibetan sources, see Lobsang N. Tsonawa (trans.), Indian Buddhist Pandits from 'The Jewel Garland of Buddhist History' (Dharamsala, 1985), 60–4.
Although it should be noted that there is a problem as to how much of the present text of the Bodhicaryāvatāra was contained in the original. The second, ninth, and tenth chapters have all had their detractors, and all the versions of Śāntideva's life mention disagreements as to the length of the work.

Citation

Williams, Paul. "General Introduction: Śāntideva and His World." In The Bodhicaryāvatāra: A Guide to the Buddhist Path to Awakening, translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton, vii–xxvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. https://archive.org/details/bodhicharyavataraofsantidevakratecrosbyandrewskiltonoup_983_f/page/n7/mode/2up.

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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.