Meditation, Mindfulness and the Awakened Life: An Updated Look at the Bodhicaryavatara of Shantideva

By Roy Melvyn

The Bodhicaryavatara is one of the most significant works in Mahayana Buddhist literature. Written entirely in verse, the text is a remarkable piece of didactic Sanskrit poetry, extolling the bodhisattva ideal and guiding a Buddhist practitioner along the complete Mahayana path, culminating in the attainment of enlightenment. The text is generally thought to have been written in the 8th century at the Buddhist university of Nalanda by the Indian master and monk Santideva.

With this updated translation, we see that Shantideva as a superbly sophisticated ethical and philosophical theorist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roy Melvyn
• Release date: Nov 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465707062

Roy Melvyn

The author now calls South East Asia his home. To learn more, visit http://roymelvyn.com.

Book preview

Meditation, Mindfulness and the Awakened Life:

An Updated Look at the Bodhicaryavatara of Shantideva

Meditation, Mindfulness and the Awakened Life:

An Updated Look at the Bodhicaryavatara of Shantideva

By Roy Melvyn

Copyright 2000 Roy Melvyn

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to the Smashwords Store to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Shantideva’s Background

Shantideva was born in the South of India, in a place called Saurastra. His father was King Kalyanavarnam, and his given name was Shantivarnam. When he was young, he naturally acted in the way of a bodhisattva. He had a great faith in the Mahayana teachings, great respect for his teachers, and he was diligent in his studies. He was always helpful to the king’s ministers and to all the subjects. He was very compassionate to the poor, the sick, and the lowly, giving them aid and protection. He also became very learned and skillful in all the arts and sciences.

During his youth, he met a wandering yogi who gave him the teachings on the Tikshna Manjushri Sadhana, and through this practice he established a strong connection with the bodhisattva Manjushri and attained a high level of realization.

When Shantideva’s father passed away, the ministers of the kingdom wanted to make Shantideva the next king, and they prepared a great throne for his enthronement ceremony. But the night before he was to be enthroned, Shantideva had a dream in which he saw Manjushri sitting on his throne, and Manjushri said, My son, this is my seat, and I am your teacher. How can we two sit on the same seat? Shantideva interpreted the dream as an indication from Manjushri that it is no use to become king. So he fled the kingdom, leaving everything behind.

He went to the monastic university of Nalanda, where he become a monk under Jayadeva, who was the head of the five-hundred panditas (scholar-practitioners) at Nalanda. It was at that time that he was given the name Shantideva.

At Nalanda, Shantideva studied all the teachings of the three pitakas and meditated on their meaning. But he studied and practised on his own, in private, and within himself, focusing on the meaning of the teachings and practice. He secretly composed two treatises that condensed the meaning of the pitakas: the Compendium of Trainings and the Compendium of Sutras.

Although Shantideva had these great qualities of realization and renunciation, he remained in Nalanda without doing anything outwardly. To the other students, he seemed to be the laziest person there, so they called him bhusuku. Bhu comes from bhukta, which means eating. And su comes from susta, which means sleeping. And ku comes from kuchiwa, which means just walking. So bhusuku is one who just eats, sleeps, and goes out to the toilet.

The students at Nalanda thought that he was a disgrace to them, because everybody else was studying and debating and giving teachings—everybody was busy doing something, and Shantideva was doing nothing. He was just sleeping in his small room, eating their food, and strolling around. They wanted to expel him, but they couldn’t find an excuse to expel him because he had done nothing wrong—because if you don’t do anything, you can’t do anything wrong! So he didn’t break any rules or do anything that was against the law. Since they couldn’t just ask him to go away, they tried to find a way to drive him away.

Then somebody had a great idea and said, We should make a new system that all the students in the university have to give a teaching. When his turn comes, he won’t know how to teach, so he will run away! They all agreed to this and they asked Shantideva to give a teaching. But Shantideva wouldn’t agree to teach. He just said, Oh, please don’t ask me. I don’t know anything. So they asked his teacher to order him to teach. So Shantideva’s teacher ordered him to teach, and then Shantideva agreed to teach.

By now the other students really wanted to embarrass him, so they built a huge throne and put it at the center of a big open field, and then they invited everybody from the whole community around the university to come and listen to Shantideva. They really wanted to make him run away!

Finally, when the time came for him to give the teaching, Shantideva just appeared on the throne. No one saw him arrive or climb onto the throne, and they couldn’t figure out how he got there. Then Shantideva said, What kind of teaching should I give? Something that has been given before, or something which has never been given before? Of course, everybody shouted, Something that has never been given before!

Shantideva replied, I have these three teachings. Compendium of Trainings is too long, and Compendium of Sutras is too short, therefore I will give you the Bodhicharyavatara, which is of middle length.

Shantideva then recited the Bodhicharyavatara from memory, and it is said that many people saw Manjushri in the sky above his head as he recited the text. Legend has it that when Shantideva reached the thirty–fourth verse of the ninth chapter, which is the most difficult part of the book, he and Manjushri levitated off the ground, and rose up higher and higher into the air until they disappeared. Shantideva's voice could still be heard until he finished the teaching.

Afterwards, everyone was very impressed! A few panditas with extraordinary memory had written down notes, but when they tried to compare their notes, there were two different opinions on what was said. According to the panditas from Kashmir, the text had nine chapters and seven hundred stanzas. But a group of panditas from central India thought it had ten chapters and one thousand stanzas. In addition, they did not know what Shantideva meant by these two books, Compendium of Trainings and Compendium of Sutras, which were referred to in the teaching.

So they searched for Shantideva all over India, and after quite some time they found him at the stupa of Shridakshina, in the south. The Nalanda scholars went there and invited Shantideva to come back to Nalanda and teach. He would not go with them, but he settled their disagreement about the text, and said that it has ten chapters and one thousand stanzas. Then he told them where to find the two other books that he had written: Shantideva had written the texts on palm leaves and hidden them under the thatched straw roof in his room. He also gave them the reading transmission and explanations of these texts.

The three books written by Shantideva are Collection of Trainings, which is quite long, Collection of Sutras, which is very short, and Bodhicharyavatara, which is of medium length. The Bodhicharyavatara was written for all beings generally, but especially for these five hundred panditas of Nalanda University, to show them the genuine path of a bodhisattva. It is said that there were one hundred and eight commentaries written on the Bodhicharyavatara in India alone.

The Ideal of the Bodhisattva

The attempt to understand and assimilate the central spiritual core of any religious tradition or collective religious heritage is most difficult. This is especially true of the Buddha's man-affirming doctrine that one must work out one's own salvation with diligence, that one must assimilate teachings so that they manifest in practice. The principle that there is no distinction between doctrine and practice constitutes the metaphysical underpinning of all Buddhist thought, no matter how much it may be lost in sectarian Buddhist theologies. This doctrine emanates from and is utterly dependent upon the centrality of the possibility of enlightenment, and it lays bare our difficulty in assimilating the teachings of the Buddha.

The difficulty takes the form of a paradox: on the one hand, one must pay careful attention to the scriptures, for one will never achieve salvation by blind belief nor will one achieve salvation by fuzzy thinking, being constantly victimized by maya. Discrimination must be developed; Buddhi must be activated. On the other hand, mere scriptural analysis, higher criticism, pedantic argumentation over the origin and meaning of particular words and over the historical development of formulations of doctrine, will not in any sense lead one to true understanding or realization. The need to develop discrimination is itself indicative of the necessity of handling the concepts taught by the Buddha, and applying them to our daily experience in such a way that we may articulate the teaching in our own words, from our own experience. Every doctrine, every scriptural point, is valid in a true Buddhist sense only to the extent that we 'engage' it and embody it in our own learning, experience and illumination. The Sixth Patriarch went so far as to say of enlightened men:

Since they have their own access to highest wisdom through the constant practice of concentration and contemplation (dhyana and samadhi), they realize that they no longer need to rely on scriptural authority.

While he could say this of enlightened men, the rest of us have to be a good deal more cautious. Nevertheless, the point he is making is germane to every individual who wishes to assimilate the basic teachings of the Buddha. Religious experience will reveal itself neither to the scholar nor to the tea-table conversationalist, but only to the man who makes the central conceptions of Buddhist thought the basis of his mental activity and the subject of his deepest meditation.

This is paradigmatically the case with the Bodhisattva ideal. Neither the nature nor the reality of the Brotherhood of Bodhisattvas, the grand fraternity which devotes its entire effort with one mind, one will and one overriding thought, to the welfare and liberation of all beings, can be grasped by other means. To assume that such a lofty conception as that of the Bodhisattva could be understood by the worldly mind would be to fall into the error of thinking that its subject could ever be understood in a realm where samvrittisatya ('relative truth') necessarily reigns. Nevertheless, if we put aside the rare case of the brilliant intellect which is refined by a fine attunement to its inner nature and warmed by a full devotion to the idea that there is no religion higher than truth, we may say that any man who continuously meditates on the ideal conception of the Bodhisattva can come to some understanding of the nature of such a being and its role in the world.

While the term 'Bodhisattva' means a number of different things and refers to various levels of spiritual attainment, we may take it that the Bodhisattva is reflected most archetypally in the Kwan-yin pledge. Kwan-yin is said to have been a Chinese princess who married a Tibetan king and led him to become a follower of the Buddha, but Kwan-yin is also assimilated to Avalokiteswara, a Buddha of inexpressible stature. Kwan-yin is said to have taken this pledge:

Never will I seek nor receive private, individual salvation; never will I enter into final peace alone; but forever and everywhere, will I live and strive for the redemption of every creature throughout the world from the bonds of conditioned existence.

This noble pledge immediately reveals two things about the Bodhisattva. The pledge can only be authentically taken by a very high being who cannot use speech in the degraded and careless fashion that we do in making cavalier claims and commitments, for the Bodhisattva commits himself to a central focus of thought in action for life and for lifetimes. The Bodhisattva has understood the full meaning of the first verse of the Dhammapada, All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, and he has taken on, in making such a vow or pledge, the highest ideal conceivable to an individuated entity. For him, then, such ideal thoughts are more real than the maya of what we call everyday facts. Herein we find a paradox or mystery. The Bodhisattva sets for himself an ideal which cannot ever be fully attained and yet he throws his whole being into its achievement with a focus of interest, concern and total commitment unknown to the average man. The taproot of reality, then, is a plane of ideation so refined that it can never fully incarnate in this world.

But we also must notice that the Bodhisattva takes a pledge. A pledge must be taken to someone or something. The Bodhisattva, however, cannot take this pledge to human beings, for although they benefit greatly from the Bodhisattva's activity, the Bodhisattva works for them whether or not they realize, understand or even care. So, since the pledge must be taken to something or someone that can hold the pledge-taker accountable, we must rule out human beings. While the Mahayana is full of the most marvelous celestial and transcendental beings, it does not identify any sovereign God, does not teach any ultimate external source of accountability. Therefore, the Bodhisattva must take the pledge to something within himself, and yet to something higher than whatever set of forms he currently occupies or anything which he can fully manifest. Remaining true to the doctrine, 'Work out your own salvation with diligence,' the Bodhisattva holds himself accountable to the highest in him for what he is pledged to do on the plane of thought in some form or rupa.

Just what is it the Bodhisattva wishes to do for all beings? While it is clear that he cannot save another, we might give the defining characteristic of the Bodhisattva in any