Verses by Śāntideva in the Śikṣāsamuccaya: A New English Translation

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

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Some years ago I published a paper[2] dealing with a number of verses appearing in Śāntideva's Śikṣāsamuccaya,[3] most of which had been previously taken as citations from Mahāyāna sūtras. The paper demonstrated that these were not citations, but most likely original compositions by Śāntideva himself. The total number of these verses, when combined with the 27 Mūlakārikas which lay out the structural plan of the whole work and whose attribution to the master has never been in doubt, amounts to 160 (more or less-this figure is arrived at by aggregating the occasional half-verses). Taken together with other previously misconstrued prose sections of the Śikṣāsamuccaya (hereafter abbreviated Śikṣ), they enable us to re-evaluate Śāntideva's status as an author rather than as a simple compiler—in other words, we can now see that the Śikṣ is something more than a patchwork quilt of sūtra quotations—and they throw interesting light on various aspects of Śāntideva's work, not least on the textual history of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (BCA) and its alternative version, the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra (BsCA).[4] In the 2007 paper I deal with the problem of the relationship between the two (or three) works in some detail, concluding that these newly identified verses support Akira Saitō's general conclusion about the order in which Śāntideva composed his texts (BsCA > Śikṣ> BCA). However, that certainly does not exhaust their significance.
Although my previous paper included an edition of the Sanskrit text of the verses as an appendix (pp. 233-48 ), for reasons of space it did not present a translation of them, despite the manifest inadequacies of the renditions appearing in Cecil Bendall and William Rouse's translation of the entire work (Śikshā-samuccaya: A Compendium of Buddhist Doctrine [London, 1922]). In this paper, therefore, I would like to present a preliminary draft of a new English translation of the entire sequence of verses, and take the opportunity to discuss certain problems of interpretation which they present, in the hope that the resulting text will serve as a fitting tribute to Richard Salomon, who has done so much to make the wealth of Indian Buddhist literature available to a wider public. (Harrison, introductory remarks, 87)

Notes

(from the title) The substance of this paper was first presented at the 2009 World Sanskrit Conference in Kyoto, but has lain fallow since then. I would like, however, to thank Jay Garfield, Dan Arnold and Jens-Uwe Hartmann for reading the translation with a critical eye and offering me some valuable suggestions.
P. Harrison, "The Case of the Vanishing Poet: New Light on Santideva and the Śikṣā-samuccaya," in Indica et Tibetica: Festschrift für Michael Hahn, Zum 65. Geburtstag von Freunden und Schülern überreicht (Vienna, 2007), ed. K. Klaus and J.-U. Hartmann, pp. 215-48. Hereafter cited as "Vanishing Poet."
For the Sanskrit text of this commentary see C. Bendall, ed., Çikshāsamuccaya: A Compendium of Buddhistic Teaching, Bibliotheca Buddhica, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1897-1902; repr. Delhi, 1971). Hereafter cited as B.
For this work, known only from Tibetan manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang, I rely on the excellent work of A. Saito, inter alia his A Study of Akṣayamati (= Śāntideva)'s Bodhicaryāvatāra as Found in the Tibetan Manuscripts from Tun-huang (Report of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Project number 02801005, Term of project 1990.4-1993.3) (Miye, 1993); and A Study of the Dun-huang Recension of the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra (Project Number 09610021, A Report of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), Term of Project 1997.4-2000.3) (Mie, 2000). I also thank Professor Saito for generously sharing with me draft transliterations of the Dunhuang manuscripts for those portions of the work not treated in these publications. A full edition of the text is awaited.

Citation

Harrison, Paul. "Verses by Śāntideva in the Śikṣāsamuccaya: A New English Translation." Bulletin of the Asia Institute 23 (2009): 87–103.

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Śāntideva (ཞི་བ་ལྷ་). Śikṣāsamuccaya [शिक्षासमुच्चय]. bslab pa kun las btus pa [བསླབ་པ་ཀུན་ལས་བཏུས་པ།]. [The Compendium of Training]. Tengyur, RKTST 3281 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3281&typ=2.

Classical WorksAbout this item

Śikṣāsamuccaya (T. Bslab pa kun las btus pa; C. Dasheng ji pusa xue lun; J. Daijōjū bosatsugakuron; K. Taesǔng chip posal hak non 大乘集菩薩學論). In Sanskrit, "Compendium of Training," a work by the eighth-century Indian Mahāyāna master Śāntideva. It consists of twenty-seven stanzas on the motivation and practice of the bodhisattva, including bodhicitta, the six perfections (pāramitā), the worship of buddhas and bodhisattvas, the benefits of renunciation, and the peace derived from the knowledge of emptiness (śūnyatā). The topic of each of the stanzas receives elaboration in the form of a prose commentary by the author as well as in illustrative passages, often quite extensive, drawn from a wide variety of Mahāyāna sūtras. Some ninety-seven texts are cited in all, many of which have been lost in their original Sanskrit, making the Śikṣāsamuccaya an especially important source for the textual history of Indian Buddhism. These citations also offer a window into which sūtras were known to a Mahāyāna author in eighth-century India. The digest of passages that Śāntideva provides was repeatedly drawn upon by Tibetan authors in their citations of sūtras. Although Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra and Śikṣāsamuccaya both deal with similar topics, the precise relation between the two texts is unclear. Several of the author's verses appear in both texts and some of the sūtra passages from the Śikṣāsamuccaya also appear in the Bodhicaryāvatāra. One passage in the Bodhicaryāvatāra also refers readers to the Śikṣāsamuccaya, but this line does not occur in the Dunhuang manuscript of the text and may be a later interpolation. (Source: "Śikṣāsamuccaya." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 821. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)