The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty

From Bodhicitta
(Redirected from The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty)
Articles/The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty

🤓 Admin Zone 🛠️ hidden to non-admins
The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty
Journal Article
Conduct


Please note that many items in our library are simply pages that represent a detailed library catalog entry and citation of someone else's work, presentation, or performance. Read our General Disclaimer for more information.

Description

The Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva tells his audience to give out alcohol, weapons and sex for reasons of Buddhist compassion, though he repeatedly warns of the dangers of all these three. The article shows how Śāntideva resolves this issue: these gifts, and gifts in general, attract their recipients to the virtuous giver, in a way that helps the recipients to become more virtuous in the long run. As a consequence, Śāntideva does recommend the alleviation of poverty, but assigns it a much smaller significance than is usually supposed. His views run counter to many engaged Buddhist discussions of political action, and lend support to the "modernist" interpretation of engaged Buddhist practice.
Citation
Lele, Amod. "The Compassionate Gift of Vice: Śāntideva on Gifts, Altruism, and Poverty." Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20 (2013): 702–34. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/files/2013/11/Lele-Santideva-Gift2.pdf.
Interconnections
1 Scholarship on
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.