- Length
- 208 pagesCrosby and Skilton, Oxford World's Classics, 1995
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Bodhicaryavatara
A monk's manual for changing his own character, which turned out to contain one of the most discussed arguments in moral philosophy. The eighth chapter's claim that suffering has no owner, and that the boundary between persons carries no moral weight, is now argued over by philosophers who have no interest in Buddhism at all.
- Date
- c. 700-750
- Author
- Santideva
- Region
- Nalanda, northern India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1909 English, L. D. Barnett Public domain Attested
- 1995 English, Crosby and Skilton From the Sanskrit; in copyright Attested
- 1997 English, Vesna Wallace and B. Alan Wallace In copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
One of the most widely read Buddhist texts in the world, and among the very few classical Indian philosophical works with a large general readership.
What the book says
Ten chapters of verse on how to become the kind of person who works for everyone else's benefit, written by a monk to himself. It opens with the value of the resolve to seek awakening for the sake of all beings, then moves through confession, the taking of that resolve, and the vigilance needed to keep it. The sixth chapter, on patience, is the most read: anger, Santideva argues, is the one thing that destroys accumulated good, and the antidote is not suppression but a change in how the provocation is understood - if the person who harmed you was driven by causes they did not choose, being angry at them is like being angry at a stick. The eighth chapter contains the argument the book is famous for in philosophy. Suffering, he says, has no owner: it should be prevented simply because it is suffering, and the division between my pain and yours has no more standing than the division between this year's pain and next year's. From this he derives the practice of exchanging self and other, treating another's welfare with the immediacy normally reserved for one's own. The ninth chapter is a compressed Madhyamaka polemic against every rival account of reality. The tenth is a dedication of whatever merit the book earns to everyone.
What it argues
That the resolve to work for all beings is the most valuable thing a person can form, and that it can be produced deliberately by a sequence of reflections rather than waited for. The philosophical core is the argument from no-self to impartial concern: if there is no enduring self, then the unity that makes my future pain mine is a convenient fiction, and the same fiction is what separates my pain from yours. Suffering is therefore to be relieved wherever it occurs, without weighting by whose it is. Alongside this runs a practical psychology of unusual acuteness - on anger, on discouragement, on the ways a person talks themselves out of what they have decided.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
In the first person, and by working on the reader's motivation rather than only their beliefs. Santideva argues, but he also exhorts, confesses, complains and rehearses - the verses on discouragement are addressed to himself as plainly as anything in Marcus Aurelius. The ninth chapter is a sharp break: it drops the personal register entirely for tight polemical argument against Samkhya, Nyaya and the Buddhist idealists, and most readers find the two halves of the book hard to hold together.
The moment
Nalanda at its height, a monastic university with thousands of students where philosophy was taught alongside grammar, medicine and logic. The traditional story is that Santideva was thought idle by his fellow monks, who invited him to recite in the expectation of humiliating him, and that he delivered this. The account is late and legendary, but it registers something true about the text: it is composed for oral delivery and reads as speech.
How it travelled
Continuously and very widely. It was translated into Tibetan several times, commented on exhaustively, and became one of the texts every educated monk knew; Prajnakaramati's Sanskrit commentary survives and is the standard. Its modern circulation owes a great deal to the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who has taught the sixth and eighth chapters repeatedly to enormous audiences, and it is now translated into English more often than any other classical Buddhist philosophical work. Academic moral philosophy discovered the eighth chapter in the 1990s and has not let go of it.
The strongest objection
That the argument from no-self proves too much or too little. If there is no self, it is not obvious why suffering should be relieved at all rather than merely occurring - the step from nobody owns it to everybody should prevent it needs something the metaphysics does not supply. And if the reasoning does work, it seems to abolish not just partiality but agency: there is no more reason for me to act than for anyone else, and no me to be doing it. Defenders answer that compassion is what remains when the fiction of ownership dissolves, rather than a conclusion derived from its dissolution. The exchange is unresolved and is one of the more productive arguments currently running in comparative ethics.
Why read it
Because it is the most humane book in this section and one of the few that can be read straight through with pleasure. Chapters six and eight are the ones to start with. It also has the rare quality of being written by someone visibly using the arguments on himself while making them, which is why it survives translation better than almost anything else here.
- First printed
- 1889
- First in English
- 1909
- Digitised
- Yes
Two recensions exist. The received version has 913 verses in ten chapters; a Tibetan translation of a shorter version, 701 verses in nine chapters, was found among the Dunhuang manuscripts at the start of the twentieth century.
Barnett's 1909 English is public domain. Crosby-Skilton, Wallace, Batchelor and the Padmakara version are in copyright, and there are many more.
Where it stands
Live in three places at once: as a devotional and practical text, as a subject of Buddhist studies, and as a live argument in analytic ethics about whether the metaphysics of the self can generate impartiality.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain and Barnett's 1909 English is too, but the verses that circulate are in modern in-copyright versions and the two recensions differ. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The two recensions are the central textual problem. The shorter Dunhuang version, 701 verses in nine chapters, is ascribed to a different name and gives a different title, and Akira Saito has argued it is the earlier - which would make the familiar text an expansion, with verses added attacking a creator god and the Samkhya system, and some verses on no-self removed. A ninth-century Tibetan catalogue records a text of the shorter length. Later Tibetan historians tell a story of monks asking Santideva himself which version was correct and being told it was the longer one, which looks like a justification produced after the fact for the version already in use. Santideva's biography is legendary throughout.