Property:Abstract
From Bodhicitta
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Once we take the bodhisattva vows, which are the essence of developing this engaged level of bodhichitta, we need to actually practice what’s called “enlightening conduct,” bodhisattva conduct. This is actually what bodhisattva vows shape; they shape that type of conduct. They shape the actions of our body, speech and mind so that we don’t act in such a way that’s going to prevent us from helping others.
We can discuss this bodhisattva conduct or bodhisattva behavior in several ways. Atisha presents it in terms of what’s called “the three higher trainings.” These are the training in higher ethical discipline, higher concentration and higher discriminating awareness or wisdom.
Read more [https://studybuddhism.com/en/tibetan-buddhism/path-to-enlightenment/commentaries-on-lam-rim-texts/commentary-on-lamp-for-the-path-to-enlightenment-dr-berzin/training-in-higher-discipline-higher-concentration here]. +
Two Concepts of Meditation and Three Kinds of Wisdom in Kamalaśīla's Bhāvanākramas: A Problem of Translation +
A close reading of the three ''Bhāvanākramaḥ'' texts, written by Kamalaśīla (740–795 CE), reveals that their author was aware of two competing concepts of meditation prevalent in Tibet at the time of their composition. The two concepts of meditation, associated with the Sanskrit words ''bhāvanā'' and ''dhyāna'', can be related respectively to the Indian and Chinese sides of the well-known debates at bSam yas. The account of the Mahāyāna path outlined in these texts implies an acceptance of the precedence of ''bhāvanā'' over ''dhyāna''. In this paper I argue that Kamalaśīla advocated ''bhāvanā'' – a conception of meditation which encompasses non-conceptual ''dhyāna'', but which also includes a discernment of reality (''bhūta-pratyavekṣā'') that is conceptual in nature. Such conceptual discernment should not be understood simply as a process of ordinary rational understanding (''cintāmayī prajñā'') but rather as constituting a special kind of meditative wisdom (''bhāvanāmayī prajñā''). A failure to recognize the subtle differences between Kamalaśīla’s employment of the terms ''dhyāna'' and ''bhāvanā'', along with his advocacy of the latter, could easily lead to mistranslation and, with this, a basic misunderstanding of his position. In particular, it could lead to a conception of insight (''vipaśyanā'') that is overly intellectual in nature. Given the historically important role that these texts played in the formation of Tibetan Buddhism, the implications of such a misconception could be far-reaching. This paper attempts to clarify the key meditation terminology found in the ''Bhāvanākrama''s as well as demonstrate the rationale for using ‘meditation’ as the default translation for ''bhāvanā''. (Source: [https://journal.equinoxpub.com/BSR/article/view/8822 Buddhist Studies Review]) +
This paper presents two dimensions of a bodhisattva, the ideal of Mahāyāna Buddhism. One dimension involves contemplative practices that disclose a pure nature that is always already present; this reality is unveiled after the obscurations that cloud it are removed. I refer to this as a "top-down" approach because it is based on qualities of awakening that are already there, yet lie beyond an ordinary being's comprehension. The second dimension, which I refer to as a "bottom-up" approach, involves directed training and discipline. Unlike the top-down approach, this is not about "going with the flow" or simply letting the innate qualities of mind express themselves. In contrast, the bottom-up approach is better described as "breaking the cycle" of suffering. That is to say, this orientation toward a bodhisattva’s practice involves restraint and discipline to train the mind by turning it away from habitual, destructive patterns to shape it into spontaneous and skillful responses and expressions. This paper will discuss both of these. +
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In "Über den Lalita Vistara," Hermann Oldenberg examines the relationship between the ''Lalita Vistara''—the well-known northern Buddhist biography of the Buddha—and the older biographical material embedded in the Pāli canon. He argues that the Pāli canon originally contained no continuous life of the Buddha, only scattered biographical fragments woven into doctrinal and monastic-rule narratives, along with a handful of old, spare "Buddha songs" preserved in texts like the Sutta-nipāta.
Oldenberg proposes that the ''Lalita Vistara'' represents the crystallization of these older songs and narrative fragments into a continuous "Buddha epic"—comparable to how the Iliad or Nibelungenlied grew from individual songs — but with the difference that the underlying Pāli sources remain directly recoverable for comparison. Through detailed textual parallels, he shows that a substantial layer of the ''Lalita Vistara''<i>'</i>s prose closely reproduces old Pāli tradition, while its metrical (gāthā) portions largely reflect much later, Sanskritized compositional layers built on an underlying Prākrit. An appendix offers a parallel passage from the Mahāsaccakasutta for comparison with the ''Lalita Vistara''. +
This chapter presents an annotated, side-by-side translation of the "On Eliminating Disease" chapter from two Chinese versions of the ''Sūtra of Golden Light'', by Dharmakṣema and Yijing respectively—one of the most widely cited Buddhist sources on classical Indian medicine, centered on the three ''doṣa''s (''vāta'', ''pitta'', ''śleṣman'') and their correlation with the three mental poisons.
Salguero argues that despite the chapter's canonical status in Buddhist tradition, it should not be read as evidence of a distinct "Buddhist medicine": the narrative—in which the future Buddha, reborn as the physician's son Jalavāhana, learns and practices medicine out of compassion during an epidemic—never attributes his medical knowledge to a Buddhist source. The doctrinal content is standard Indian medicine framed in a Buddhist narrative. He notes this does not diminish the text's value, however, since Dharmakṣema and Yijing preserved the material with minimal Chinese doctrinal interpolation, making it a useful, relatively unobstructed source for the history of Indian medicine itself.
The translated content covers seasonal fluctuations of the bodily Elements and doṣas, flavor- and diet-based treatments, the "Eight Arts" of medicine, diagnosis of constitutional type, prognostic death-signs, and universal remedies (myrobalan, ghee, honey, sugar), closing with an injunction to practice medicine from compassion rather than profit. +
Unique Sanskrit Fragments of the "Sūtra of the Golden Light" in the Manuscript Collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences) +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
The unique fragments of the canonical text of the "Sūtra of Golden Light" (Skt. "Suvarṇabhāsottama-sūtra") came along with the manuscripts collected in Kashgar by the secretary of the Russian consulate P. I. Lavrov [1]. Now they are included in the Central Asiatic manuscript collection — "Ser India" (SI). In 1915–9 they were examined by N. D. Mironov, a member of the Asiatic Museum staff. At that period academician S. Th. Oldenburg invited N. D. Mironov to work on the manuscripts written in the Brāhmī script. These were brought to St. Petersburg by Russian scholars from East Turkestan or sent from there by Russian diplomats. In 1919 Mironov left Soviet Russia and continued his work in India, China and Europe. Before his departure he only managed to publish his paper on a Sanskrit-Tocharian bilingual fragn1ent of the "Dharmapada" from the M. M. Berezovsky collection [2].<br> A number of manuscripts in Sanskrit — from the I. P. Lavrov collection, in Khotanese Saka — from the S. E. Malov collection, and in Tocharian — from the M. M. Berezovsky collection, were not available to scholars for a long time, because they were stored in Mironov's archives among his private documents. In 1930 these documents became a part of the 'Archives of Orientalists' established as one of the departments of the newly founded Institute of Oriental studies, the immediate successor of the Asiatic Museum.<br> Only in 1961, when the archives of Mironov were sorted, the above mentioned manuscripts came to the Manuscript Department of the Institute. All the fragments, however, were in a very bad condition, so the keepers were not actually able to touch them. Only in spring of 1994 the conservators of the Institute began to restore these fragments. In the course of restoration several unique manuscripts have been discovered. We were fortunate to identify some of them preliminary before restoration. Among them there are fragments from the "Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra", the "Pratimokṣa-sūtra" of the Mahāsaṅghika school and the "Suvarṇabhāsa-sūtra". Fragments from the latter were chosen to be published first. (Tyomkin, preliminary remarks, 29) [http://www.orientalstudies.ru/eng/images/pdf/a_tyomkin_1995.pdf Read more here]
<h5>Notes</h5>
#P. I. Lavrov, the secretary of the Russian consulate in Kashgar during the first decade of the XX century. He enjoyed finding old manuscripts and artifacts. All the antiquities collected by him was sent to St. Petersburg, to the Russian Committee for Central and Eastern Asia Studies.
#N. D. Mironov, "Iz rukopisnykh materialov ekspeditsii Berezovskogo v Kuchu" ("From the manuscripts brought from Kucha by the Berezovsky expedition"), ''Mélange Asiatique 14'' (St. Petersburg, 1909-10), pp. 97–112.
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
What if the free will issue was never really about determinism? What if the only reason determinism ever ''seemed'' relevant to the question of whether our actions are truly our own is that causal chains stretching far back into our past constitute a vivid way of showing that our actions belong to the universe? What if the absence of free will is just a special case of the frightening, liberating truth that ''nothing'' is our own, because there is no self? That might explain why the free will issue seems intractable: despite the enormous attention lavished on it, philosophers haven’t fully understood it. It might help explain recent surprising empirical results suggesting that belief in free will and in determinism are not opposed, but represent two largely statistically independent factors (Nadelhoffer and Tocchetto 2013, p. 126). It might explain why critiques of free will feel threatening: they have the potential to undermine the one thing we are most invested in, our false belief in a real self.<br> Since what is most philosophically distinctive about Buddhism is its rejection of that false belief, Buddhists should be committed to the non-existence of free will. Many scholars appear reluctant to accept this conclusion, though, perhaps because they overestimate how destructive and revisionary it would be. I have proposed that the most defensible Buddhist view of free will would be a form of 'hard incompatibilism' (Goodman 2009), the view that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism (Pereboom 2007). Hard incompatibilists do not claim that we cannot change, or that our actions make no difference, or that making an effort to improve is pointless. Instead, they reject the existence of basic desert and regard interpersonal reactive attitudes such as anger and resentment as cognitively inappropriate.<br> We can be said to deserve many things: praise, blame, rewards, punishments, and so on. The specific form of desert that Pereboom (2007, p. 86) says we should reject, considered in relation to blame or credit, is basic in the sense that the agent, to be morally responsible, would deserve the blame or credit just because she has performed the action (assuming she understands its moral status), and not by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations.<br> Thus, Pereboom does not want to issue a blanket ban on blaming or praising, or to say that no one deserves anything. Practices of holding people responsible can have socially beneficial consequences that can create derivative, institutional, non-basic forms of desert and responsibility. What Pereboom denies is that our actions could give rise to reasons to treat us well or badly, independently of the consequences resulting from such treatment. The issue about praise and blame is, in its direct practical implications, almost trivial; the rubber meets the road when we consider the justification of punishment and systems of criminal justice.<br> Note that much blame consists of accurate descriptions of a person’s character. For instance, in a world without basic desert or deep moral responsibility, someone might persistently neglect his responsibilities due to laziness. To tell that person "You are lazy!" would be an accurate description, and 'appropriate' as such. But no amount of laziness could cause that person to deserve, in a basic sense, the distress it might cause him to be told so. We should tell him, truthfully, he is lazy ''only if that would be helpful'', and never simply to hurt his feelings, no matter how much havoc his laziness has caused.<br> Hard incompatibilism includes a claim I summarize by saying that anger, resentment, and other interpersonal reactive attitudes are cognitively inappropriate. When I say that a particular emotion is cognitively inappropriate, I mean it is partly constituted by a judgment that is false and unwarranted. Thus, a hard incompatibilist could say that anger at person X for doing action A involves construing X as being, in some deep and ultimate sense, the source of A; but we are never the sources of our actions in this sense.<br> It’s hard to deny that Buddhists disapprove of anger and resentment; but few Buddhist texts consider the free will problem in any recognizable form—few, but not none. Many scholars agree that the problem is raised explicitly by Śāntideva in Ch. VI of his ''Bodhicaryāvatāra'' (''BCA''; all references to ''BCA'' are to the Crosby and Skilton, 1995 translation; Goodman 2009 examines this in detail). Here's one crucial verse from Śāntideva's discussion of the issue:<br>
:In this way everything is dependent upon something else. Even that thing upon which each is dependent is not independent. Since, like a magical display, phenomena do not initiate activity, at what does one get angry like this?
::::::::::::(''BCA''.VI.31; Crosby and Skilton 1995, p. 52)
This verse looks like an argument for incompatibilism. But we must ask: What is being claimed to be incompatible with what? On my interpretation, the core of this argument is the claim that the availability of an impersonal, causal level of description of actions is incompatible with the cognitive appropriateness of anger. (Goodman, introductory remarks, 34-35)
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Critical Sanskrit edition of the ''Vajracchedikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra'', edited by Max Müller 1881. Published as part 1 of 3 in the volume ''Buddhist Texts from Japan''. The other texts in this book include the ''Sukhāvatīvyūha'', the ''Bhagavatīprajñāpāramitāhṛdaya'', and the (''Āryasarvadurgatipariśodhani'') - ''Uṣṇiṣavijayanāmadhāraṇī''. +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
This work belongs to a class of Buddhist books called Prajná Páramitá. It was translated first into the Chinese by Kumára-jíva (A.D. 405), who was brought into China from Thibet. "The King of Tsin had sent an army into that country with directions not to return without the Indian whose fame had spread amongst all the neighbouring nations. The former translations of Buddhist works were to a great extent erroneous. To produce them in a form more accurate and complete was the task undertaken by Kumára-jíva. More than eight hundred priests were called to assist him; and the king himself, an ardent disciple of the new faith, was present at the conference, holding the old copies in his hand as the work of correction proceeded, More than three hundred volumes were thus prepared." (Edkins).<br> Most of these works were afterwards re-translated by Hiouen Thsang: his version, however, of the work we are now considering is not so commonly used in China as that by Kumára-jíva.<br> A translation of this Sútra, from the Mongolian has been published by M. Schmidt. I have not had an opportunity of comparing it with the Chinese.<br> The work is divided into thirty-two sections, each of which has a distinct title and subject of discussion. (Beal, preliminary remarks, 1-2) +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
In the following pages readers will find a new English translation of the Sanskrit text of the ''Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā'' based on two of the oldest surviving manuscript copies of the work. The first of these copies is the one in the Schøyen Collection, edited in this volume by Harrison & Watanabe. Only recently discovered, it appears as the second text (following the ''Bhaiṣajyaguru'') in MS 2385. This ms is presumed to have come from Afghanistan, possibly the Bamiyan area, and is dated on paleographical grounds to the 6th–7th centuries. The second copy is the Gilgit ''Vajracchedikā'', discovered in Northern Pakistan in 1931, and subsequently edited by Chakravarti (1956), Dutt (1959), and Schopen (1989). Since the last edition by Schopen is the only reliable one, it is used as the basis for this translation. The date of the Gilgit ms is approximately 6th–7th centuries also. The Schøyen ms (henceforth S) preserves roughly the first half of the text, in a continuous run over fols. 26–46 (corresponding to §§1–16c), the Gilgit (henceforth G) the last two thirds, on fols. 5–12, but with the loss of one folio, No. 6 (thus covering §§13b–14e, 15b–32b). In basing a translation on a combination of these two manuscripts—joining the upper half of one body to the bottom half of the other, as it were—one is obviously taking the risk of creating a hybrid Frankenstein's monster unlike any version that ever existed, but there is sufficient overlap in the waist area to establish that the two manuscripts represent roughly the same recension of the text, even if they are not identical.[1] Provided that one clearly marks the line between the two halves, leaving all the stitches visible, no great harm is done. The result is, I hope, a useful rendition of this important text in the form in which it was circulating in the area of Greater Gandhāra in the 6th and 7th centuries A.D. (Harrison, introduction, 133) +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
This is a fresh manuscript of the Vajracchedika. The text of that work was published by Max Müller, from manuscripts discovered in Japan, in the Anecdota Oxoniensia (Aryan Series), vol. i, part i, in 1881. The manuscript, now published, was discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in his first expedition to Eastern Turkestan in the years 1900-1. As related by him in his Ancient Khotan, vol. i, p. 258, it was dug out on the 23rd of December, 1900, from the ruins of a small 'dwelling-place' [id. p. 256) belonging to the ancient settlement of Dandān Uiliq; see also ''id.'', p. 295, and the same author's Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan p. 300. It was identified by Dr. Hoernle as containing the text of the Vajracchedikā; and a notice of the identification was published by him in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1903, p. 364.<br> This manuscript is written on nineteen folios, long and narrow, of coarse country paper, and each folio is about 39 cm. (15 1/4 inches) in length and 75 mm. (2 15/16 inches) in width. It is in fairly good preservation, except that parts have perished or decayed. The folios are numbered on the left margin of the obverse side, and are all present except nos. 1, 3-5, and 12, which are wanting. A few of the folios are nearly whole (nos. 11, 17, and 18), some have lost one or both ends (nos. 7, 8, and 16), but most have perished more or less within the page, and present gaps severing the papier in two, partially or completely (nos. 2, 6, 9, 10, 13-15, and 19). In the transcript these gaps are enclosed within the mark (missing character). Where the paper has not perished, the writing has suffered injur in many places, so as to show every stage of decay from merely slight defacement to total obliteration. The folios which have suffered least are nos. 17 and 18, which are reproduced in Plate CVIII in vol. ii of Sir Aurel Stein's Ancient Khotan, while for the present volume fol. 14''b'' (shown in Plate XXI) has been selected, in order to give an idea of the more common condition of the leaves of the manuscript. (Pargiter, preliminary remarks, 176) [https://archive.org/details/cu31924023185584/page/176/mode/2up Read more here]
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
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.<br> 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)
<h5>Notes</h5>
#(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.
Chapter 5 concerns the topic of vigilant introspection. This discussion is a continuation of Śāntideva's theme of protecting the attitude of bodhicitta. Here, such vigilance requires the constant guarding of the mind from negative emotions through mindfulness, the discipline of refraining from negative conduct, the discipline of practicing virtuous dharmas, and the discipline of working for the benefit of beings. +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
This is an English translation of the ''Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa'' (Nanjiō 146), being the first attempt * to introduce the text to Western readers. Strangely, no one has so far tried to translate it into any of the European languages—a book so full of interest in various ays and so largely contributing to the foundations of Oriental philosophy and religion. (Idumi, introduction, vol. 2, 358)
<h5>Notes</h5>
#I did not know when I wrote these lines that an English translation by Mr. Kakichi Ōhara appeared in the ''Hansei-Zasshi'' for 1898–99, which is now extremely difficult to obtain. +
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No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
Anyone who becomes familiar with Buddhist thought eventually has to deal with the question of how compassion can be meaningful, if both its agent and its object are ultimately unreal. The ultimate truth of Buddhism, whether that truth is no-self or emptiness, seems to deny both the object of compassion and the compassionate subject. The Buddhist ethic, which takes the suffering of sentient beings seriously, seems to be at odds with its ultimate truth, which denies the very existence of those beings. This chapter begins by taking up how this presents itself to us as a philosophical and interpretive problem, and then investigates Indian Buddhist sources that recognized and directly addressed these problems in systematic thought. The motif of the three objects, or ''ālambana'', of ''karuṇā'' served as a frame for discussing how compassion made sense to Mādhyamika thinkers such as Candrakīrti, Śāntideva, and Prajñākaramati. (Jenkins, preliminary remarks, 97) +
Waking up from Delusion: Mindfulness (Sati) and Right Mind-and-Heart (Bodhicitta) for Educating Activists (Bai 2022) +
In the face of current turbulent times including climate emergencies, species extinction, the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism—in short, a suffering world—the authors of this paper propose that education needs to be centrally an activist effort dedicated to healing and repairing the increasingly wounded and damaged world. To this end, this paper explores Buddhism as an educational program that centralizes a healing curriculum based on the understanding that healing comes from waking up from the delusion of possessive individualism (ego-selves) that gives rise to neoliberal capitalist societies. This delusion is the existential home of suffering. Waking up requires the disciplined effort of seeing through and past individualism to the workings of mutual causality within a universe of interconnection (Interbeing), such as ours. The mindfulness (sati) practice that the historical Buddha taught is such a form of mental discipline. Through the agentic cultivation of sati and subsequent remembrance of our inherent Interbeing, we can rediscover and rekindle the inherently enlightened mind of bodhicitta. This paper explores various psychological, sociocultural, ideological, and relational conditionings that act as barriers to seriously practicing mindfulness, including the currently popular conceptions of mindfulness in North America. While acknowledging that successful practice takes setting up the right conditions, our paper also delves into helpful and supportive conditions for mindfulness practice for activists, namely, ethical motivation and contemplative/healing emotions such as the Four Immeasurables. +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
Bodhicitta (Skt., translated as "awakening mind" or "thought of enlightenment") is the commitment to embark on a path of awakening and be a bodhisattva, one dedicated to the liberation all beings. Bodhicitta is born of compassion, the desire to free all beings from suffering, even those who wish us harm or consider us enemies. One of the foundations of the Mahayana tradition, bodhicitta is woven into many of its teachings. +
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
''Bodhicaryāvatāra'' was composed by the Buddhist monk scholar Śāntideva at Nālandā University in India sometime during the 8th Century CE. It stands as one the great classics of world philosophy and of Buddhist literature, and is enormously influential in Tibet, where it is regarded as the principal source for the ethical thought of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The title is variously translated, most often as ''A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life'' or ''Engaging in the Bodhisattva Deeds'', translations that follow the canonical Tibetan translation of the title of the book (''Byang chub sems pa'i spyod pa la 'jug pa'') and the commentarial tradition of Tibet. But that translation itself represents only one of two possible original Sanskrit titles, and a more natural English rendering of either Sanskrit title is simply ''How to Lead an Awakened Life'', and that indeed describes the content of the text admirably. Taking this as the meaning of the title can issue in a kind of gestalt shift in our view of the text, allowing us to see it not so much as a characterization of the extraordinary moral life of a saint, but as a guide to moral development open to any of us. I therefore recommend that as an English translation of the title and as an understanding of the subject of the text.<br> Śāntideva’s understanding of how to lead such a life is distinctive, and is very different from accounts of the moral or the exemplary life familiar in the Western tradition. It is, I will argue, primarily a phenomenological account, and that is why I think it important for this account of Buddhist ethics to be taken as a voice in the contemporary philosophical conversation about the nature of ethics and about the proper form of moral theory. When read in the context of contemporary metaethics, and only as an important text in the history of Buddhism, ''How to Lead an Awakened Life'' gains new importance. (Garfield, introduction, 333–34)
No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:
When I first encountered the ''Bodhicharyavatara'', the great work of Achariya Shantideva, the eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher, it left me feeling overwhelmed and underaccomplished. Yet at the same time I was deeply moved by its extraordinary wisdom and compassion, and the depth of insights into anger and patience. Through the years I have become more familiar with the text, but still harbor no delusion of fully grasping all the subtleties or the profound depth of its understanding. Shantideva offers teachings on patience that are as insightful and relevant today as they must have been when he wrote them thirteen centuries ago. My appreciation for the ''Bodhicharyavatara'' has been enhanced enormously by the various times I have heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama offer teachings on the text. His Holiness has said the ''Bodhicharyavatara'' has been the highest inspiration for his ideals and practices. I am motivated here by a belief that every opportunity one has to experience these teachings can only be beneficial. May I humbly suggest paddling slowly; the waters here are deep. (Lokos, introductory remarks, 149) +
An account of how certain presuppositions led the author astray in previous attempts at interpreting a key metaphor in Śāntideva’s ''Bodhicaryāvatāra'' 1.10. +
