Śāntideva

Śāntideva was an Indian Buddhist monk, philosopher and poet. Reliable details of his life are scarce. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dates him to the late 7th to mid-8th century, because another Indian author, Śāntarakṣita, quotes him in a text that must have been written by 763 CE.

Tibetan tradition tells a well-known story about him. Traditional accounts say he was a monk at Nālandā who seemed to do nothing but eat and sleep. Some of the monks in authority, hoping to shame him, asked him to recite at a festival and built him an elaborate throne for it. He asked the audience whether they wanted to hear something old or something new, then began the Bodhicaryāvatāra. In the legend he rose into the air while reciting, vanished at verse 9.34, and a voice carried on to the end. SEP cites the account of the Tibetan historian Butön.

Two works are unanimously attributed to him. The Bodhicaryāvatāra (“Entering the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”) is a poem on awakening the mind of bodhicitta and living by it. The longer version, of about a thousand verses, was the one Tibetans treated as canonical, and it is the one most translated today. Some scholars hold that a shorter version of about seven hundred verses came first. Its opening chapters cover the benefits of bodhicitta, confession, and taking the bodhisattva vow. Patrul Rinpoche wrote a practice guide to the poem, The Brightly Shining Sun.

The second work is the Śikṣā-samuccaya (“Compendium of Training”), an anthology of passages from more than a hundred Mahāyāna sūtras with his comments. It also records daily monastic life and preserves Sanskrit passages from sūtras otherwise lost in that language.

The Bodhicaryāvatāra has been translated into many languages. SEP singles out the Wallace and Wallace translation for precision and the Crosby and Skilton translation for clarity. SEP notes that many Tibetan rituals quote from it or are shaped by it, and the Dalai Lama has called it his favourite religious work.