Shantideva (–763)

A great collection of aphorism, but also a sophisticated philosophical consideration of two major problems for salvific religions: if I'm concerned with my own salvation, should I care about other people, and why? The obvious answer, of course, is that your treatment of other people is intimately related to your own salvation, but that's much harder to justify than you might think. Santideva was a monk, writing to other monks, and prone to answering questions like how will all this show more meditation really help other people though? by saying things like "The perfection is the mental attitude itself." Because you kind of have to say that if you're going to defend withdrawal from the world, and you kind of have to withdraw from the world if you're going to live a life of purity, which is the only way to save yourself... right?

Well, what follows the above quote (5.10) is a pretty good try to get out of that logic.

The other problem concerns the value we place of this world. In Santideva's understanding of Buddhist cosmology, nothing exists, everything is illusion, and this causes some pretty obvious problems: why should I bother trying to avoid rebirth, if it's all just illusion anyway? Isn't the process of trying to avoid rebirth just as illusory as the pleasure we take from a nice meal? Book 9 tries to answer such questions, not very well in my eyes, but with a great deal of thought. And this is, again, applicable to all salvific religions: how do you balance the desire for a better state of existence with the needs of the present state? This is connected to the first problem, of course.

The Oxford World's Classics translation is a good one, scholarly but not obtrusive. The notes are helpful, while, of course, avoiding much discussion of the tremendous cosmology needed to justify the idea of rebirth. There's a lot of suffering and hell in this book, and the editors take the easy "oh, it's just in your mind" way out, which means they don't have to tell us anything about the various levels of hell and so on. That's okay, you can't annotate everything. I just want to know more about the levels. show less

I plan to reread this often--I read it twice during His Holiness the Dalai Lama's week-long teachings from it. As in my review for His Holiness's "Stages of Meditation," I suppose I might appreciate this text more for the explanations His Holiness offered during those teachings, but this book is, so far, the other of those two most profound and instructive guides to formal meditation I've read so far. The translators claim they have lost some of the beauty of Shantideva's poetry, and I don't show more doubt it, but their presentation is excellent, especially in the way they handled the distinctions between the Sanskrit and the Tibetan versions of the text. A profound, beautiful book,and an excellent guide for anyone's life, Buddhist or non-Buddhist. show less

It is instructions about how to practice compassion in every phase of life, for every possible circumstance. It guides the reader in how to think about and interact with others, how to deal with one's own mind and one's own emotions, and how to be compassionate when you feel that every aspect of the world is against you. Each stanza holds rich meaning. Careful reading is the only way to absorb it. You don't sit down and read the whole book or even a whole chapter. You read a few stanzas and show more you contemplate them. Additional stanza-by-stanza commentary is available online from Tibentan Buddhist teachers. show less

In the whole of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there is no single treatise more deeply revered or widely practiced than A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life. Composed in the eighth century by the Indian Bodhisattva Santideva, it became an instant classic in the curricula of the Buddhist monastic universities of India, and its renown has grown ever since. Santideva presents methods to harmonize one's life with the Bodhisattva ideal and inspires the reader to cultivate the perfections of show more the Bodhisattva: generosity, ethics, patience, zeal, meditative concentration, and wisdom. show less