Quick Answer
Chapter six is worth the whole book, and you do not have to be Buddhist to use it. Shantideva's treatment of anger is the most rigorous ever written: he does not ask you to suppress it, he takes apart the beliefs it needs in order to exist. The rest is uneven for a modern reader. Chapter nine is a technical debate almost nobody finishes without a commentary, and chapter eight contains passages about the body and the self that will land badly on some people and should be flagged rather than glossed.
Key Takeaways
- The anger chapter is the reason to own it and it functions as secular moral psychology.
- Shantideva argues rather than asserts, which is rare in devotional literature.
- Chapter nine needs a commentary. Reading it cold is not a fair test of the book.
- Some passages need care. The body meditations were written for celibate monks in the eighth century.
- Padmakara for reading, Oxford for study. The translations differ substantially in feel.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
The Bodhicharyavatara, usually rendered in English as The Way of the Bodhisattva or A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, is an eighth-century Sanskrit poem in ten chapters and roughly nine hundred verses.
Its subject is what someone actually does after they have committed to awakening for the sake of everyone rather than for themselves. Not the doctrine behind that commitment; the practice of it, day by day, in a mind that keeps failing to cooperate.
In Tibetan Buddhism it is not one text among many. It is the practical text, memorised, commented on endlessly, and quoted by teachers at every level. The present Dalai Lama has taught it repeatedly over decades and describes it as his principal source for the material on compassion.
On the two English titles. They translate the same work. Older translations tend toward the guide phrasing; the Padmakara version uses the shorter title. If you see both on a shelf, they are not different books.
Shantideva and the Legend
What is known: he was a monk at Nalanda, the great monastic university in what is now Bihar, probably in the eighth century. That is close to all of it.
What is told: that his fellow monks regarded him as useless, someone who did nothing but eat, sleep and take care of his body, and that they arranged for him to give a public teaching expecting him to be humiliated. He asked whether they wanted something conventional or something they had not heard, was told the latter, and recited this text from memory. At the ninth chapter, on emptiness, he is said to have risen into the air and gradually vanished, the verses continuing to be heard after he could no longer be seen.
The story is legend. It is also revealing about how the text was received, and specifically about the ninth chapter, which the tradition treats as the moment the ground gives way. A reader who finds that chapter impossible is having the reaction the legend dramatises.
How the Ten Chapters Work
The arrangement is deliberate and worth knowing before you open it, because reading in order is not obviously the best strategy.
The first three chapters establish the commitment: what the awakening mind is worth, a confession of past harm, and the formal undertaking. The fourth and fifth deal with carefulness and with watching one's own mind. Chapters six through nine treat four of the perfections in turn: patience, diligence, meditative concentration, and wisdom. The tenth is a dedication of merit.
The practical centre of gravity is chapters six and eight. The philosophical centre is nine. The first five are preparation and read as such, and a first-time reader who begins at chapter six loses very little and gains a great deal.
What Bodhicitta Actually Means
The word is usually translated as the awakening mind or the mind of enlightenment, and both are vague enough to obscure what is being proposed.
The commitment is this: to become fully awakened, and to do it for the sake of every being without exception, including the ones you dislike, the ones who have harmed you, and the overwhelming majority you will never encounter.
Shantideva distinguishes two stages, using a comparison that clarifies it immediately. There is the aspiration, which is wanting to go somewhere, and there is the undertaking, which is being on the road. Both have value and they are not the same, and confusing the warm feeling of the first for the actual work of the second is the standard failure mode.
The opening chapter is a sustained argument for why this commitment is worth making, and it is frankly extravagant. Shantideva piles up images: the awakening mind as the alchemical elixir turning the ordinary body into something precious, as the one lamp in a long night, as a tree that yields fruit continuously rather than once.
Chapter Six, and Why It Is Different
Almost every tradition tells you not to be angry. Shantideva does something else, and it is the reason this text survives outside its religion.
He treats anger as a conclusion. It is not a weather event that happens to you; it is the output of a set of premises you are holding, mostly without examining them, and if the premises fail the conclusion cannot stand. So he goes after the premises, one at a time, for over a hundred verses.
He begins with the observation that anger destroys whatever good you have accumulated, and that no enemy has ever done you the damage your own anger has.
Then he locates its fuel precisely: the mind made unhappy by not getting what it wants or by getting what it does not want. Anger requires a prior discontent to catch on. Attend to the discontent and the anger has nothing to burn.
Then the argument everyone remembers. If a situation can be remedied, why be upset? Do the thing. If it cannot be remedied, what does being upset accomplish? The point is not that distress is forbidden. The point is that it is doing no work in either case, and noticing that is a different operation from being told to calm down.
What makes this chapter unusual is that it never asks you to be a better person. It asks you to check whether your reaction makes sense on its own terms, and it does the checking with you rather than for you. That is why it survives translation into a secular context so well. You can disbelieve every metaphysical claim in the book and the argument about remediable and irremediable situations still applies to you this afternoon.
The Leather Argument
Chapter five contains the image most often quoted from the whole text, and it is usually quoted without its sting.
Shantideva asks how one might cover the whole earth in leather so as to walk without pain, answers that there is not enough leather in the world, and observes that the soles of one's own shoes accomplish the same thing.
The common reading makes this a piece of pleasant wisdom about acceptance. The actual context is harder. He is arguing that the attempt to arrange external conditions so that nothing irritates you is not merely difficult but structurally impossible, and that the effort spent on it is the reason people arrive at old age exhausted and no less irritable.
It is also, read carefully, an argument about scale. Working on the world is unbounded. Working on your own reaction is a finite task with an end. He is not saying the second is easy. He is saying it is the only one that terminates.
Nobody Chose to Anger You
The deepest argument in the chapter is the one modern readers find most difficult, and it deserves fair statement.
Shantideva asks what exactly you are angry at. The person who harmed you acted from causes: their history, their conditioning, their state at that moment, the anger or fear driving them, none of which they selected. He compares it to being burned and blaming the fire, which is only doing what fire does, and to being struck with a stick and being angry at the person rather than the stick, when the person was as moved by their afflictions as the stick was by the hand.
He extends it to himself. If everything arises from causes, his own anger does too, and there is no more ground for self-righteousness than for blame.
The objection is obvious and worth making: this appears to dissolve responsibility entirely, and a moral world in which nobody could have done otherwise is not one most people can live in.
The traditional reply is that the argument is aimed at a specific target, the hot conviction that the other person is a free agent who chose to harm you out of pure malice, which is the belief anger actually runs on. Removing that is compatible with holding people accountable, protecting yourself, and ending a relationship. Whether the reply is fully adequate is a genuine philosophical question. Whether the argument reduces the heat when you are in the middle of a resentment is a different question, and empirically it does.
Exchanging Self and Other
Chapter eight contains the text's most demanding practice and its most quoted line of moral argument.
Shantideva builds it in two steps. First equalising: your suffering is not more real or more urgent than anyone else's, and the sense that it is comes from proximity rather than from any property of the suffering. He points out that we already treat pain across a body as one thing to be relieved without asking which limb has the strongest claim, and asks why the boundary of a skin should be the place that reasoning stops.
Then exchanging, which is more radical: deliberately reversing the priority, imaginatively taking on the discomfort of others and giving away one's own advantage, until the reflex to protect oneself first is weakened.
The line the whole tradition quotes sits here: that all the happiness there is in the world comes from wishing others to be happy, and all the suffering from wishing oneself to be.
What It Became
This material was later developed by Tibetan teachers into the formal practice of tonglen, in which the practitioner breathes in the suffering of others and breathes out relief, deliberately reversing the direction of ordinary self-protection.
Its modern presentation owes a great deal to teachers in the Shambhala lineage, and readers who have met it through contemporary writing on difficulty are meeting Shantideva at two removes.
Worth knowing: the practice is traditionally taught after a good deal of preparation, and specifically after some stability in ordinary loving-kindness practice, precisely because taking on suffering deliberately is not a beginner's exercise.
The Passages That Land Badly
An honest review has to name these rather than steer around them.
Chapter eight includes an extended meditation on the repulsiveness of the human body, dwelling at length on its interior contents, its fluids, and what it becomes after death. This is a standard monastic exercise with a specific and narrow purpose: weakening sexual craving in celibate monks by countering the idealisation that craving depends on. In its original setting it is a targeted antidote.
Encountered by a general modern reader, particularly one with a difficult relationship to their own body, it reads as disgust rather than as analysis, and it can do real harm.
The text also speaks about the self in language that is deliberately harsh, addressing one's own self-cherishing as an enemy to be defeated. In a monastic context, held by a community and a teacher, that rhetoric has a function. Read alone by someone already inclined to self-attack, it supplies ammunition.
Read these sections with the context in view, or skip them. If you have any history of an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, self-harm, depression involving harsh self-criticism, or trauma, the body meditations in chapter eight and the passages attacking the self are worth approaching with a teacher or not at all. This is not a modern squeamishness about difficult teachings. Every serious Tibetan commentary insists that the exchange practice requires a practitioner with a stable sense of self to begin with, because you cannot give away what you do not have, and attempting it from depletion produces collapse rather than compassion. If contemplative practice is reliably making you feel worthless, that is a signal to stop and speak to someone qualified, not a sign that it is working.
Chapter Nine
The wisdom chapter is where most readers stop, and the reason is not weakness of will.
It is a technical philosophical debate. Shantideva argues the Madhyamaka position on emptiness against a sequence of opponents, including other Buddhist schools and non-Buddhist Indian philosophical systems, and he does not explain who they are or what they hold. The text assumes you already know, because its original audience did.
The core claim is that phenomena lack inherent existence, arising in dependence on conditions and on conceptual designation, and that this emptiness is not nothingness but the reason change and action are possible at all. He then defends this against the charge that it destroys ethics and against the objection that emptiness must itself be something.
Read without a commentary, it is a wall. Read with one, it is difficult but tractable, and the traditional Tibetan commentaries exist precisely because it was recognised as needing them from early on.
The tradition's view is that everything before this chapter is preparation for it, since compassion without the wisdom that sees through the solidity of self and other is held to be unstable. A reader who only wants chapter six is taking the tradition's second-most-important thing and leaving the first, and should at least know that is what they are doing.
Which Translation
This matters more than usual, because the text is verse and the English versions differ enormously in register.
The Padmakara Translation Group's version, published by Shambhala, works largely from the Tibetan and reads as poetry. It is the one most people should buy first, it is the one most quoted, and it has the flow that makes the anger chapter usable.
The Oxford World's Classics edition by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton translates from the Sanskrit, includes substantial introductions to each chapter, and is the better choice for study. It is less beautiful and more precise.
Other versions exist, including one prepared with the Dalai Lama's involvement and Stephen Batchelor's earlier rendering. For chapter nine specifically, any version is best read alongside a published commentary rather than alone.
What Holds Up
The anger chapter, without qualification. It is the best sustained treatment of the subject in world literature, it proceeds by argument rather than by exhortation, and it works on a reader who accepts none of its metaphysics.
The distinction between aspiration and undertaking, which names a failure that recurs in every kind of self-improvement and gives it a shape.
And the honesty about the mind's non-cooperation. Shantideva is not writing as someone who has finished. Chapter after chapter records the mind wandering off, the resolve failing, the resentment returning, and he treats this as the ordinary condition of the work rather than as evidence that the reader is unsuited to it.
Who Should Read It
Read chapter six if you have a recurring problem with anger or resentment, regardless of what you believe. It requires no commitment and it does not assume rebirth.
Read the whole thing if you are approaching Tibetan Buddhism, because it is the text most of its teachers are drawing on when they talk about how the path is actually walked.
Read it alongside contemporary teachers who have unpacked it, and alongside Trungpa on the ways practice goes wrong, which is a useful corrective to reading any devotional text uncritically.
Do not start with chapter one and grind forward. Do not attempt chapter nine without a commentary and conclude the book is impenetrable. And do not take the chapter eight body meditations out of their monastic context.
The single most portable thing here is the two-question test on distress, and it costs nothing to use. When something has upset you, ask whether anything can be done about it. If it can, the upset is a substitute for doing it, so do it instead. If it cannot, the upset is not preserving anything, protecting anything or fixing anything, and holding onto it is a choice being made without being noticed. Shantideva is not claiming this makes the feeling disappear. He is claiming that a feeling you have looked at squarely and found to be doing no work loses a good deal of its grip, and on that narrow claim he is right often enough to be worth carrying.
Chapter six alone justifies the shelf space.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our reasons for preferring this translation, and our cautions about specific chapters, are set out above and are independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Way of the Bodhisattva?
An eighth-century Sanskrit poem in ten chapters, known as the Bodhicharyavatara, setting out the path of someone who commits to awakening for the sake of all beings. It is the single most cited practical text in Tibetan Buddhism.
Who was Shantideva?
A monk at the Nalanda monastic university in India, generally placed in the eighth century. Almost nothing certain is known about him, and the traditional biography, in which his fellow monks assumed he was idle and set out to humiliate him publicly, is legend rather than record.
What is bodhicitta?
The mind or heart of awakening: the intention to become fully awakened for the benefit of all beings rather than for oneself. Shantideva distinguishes the aspiration to do it from the actual undertaking, as the difference between wanting to travel and setting out.
Which chapter is most famous?
Chapter six, on patience, which is a sustained analysis of anger and probably the most useful thing written on the subject in any tradition. It works by attacking the assumptions anger depends on rather than by asking you to suppress it.
What is the leather argument?
Shantideva observes that you cannot cover the whole earth in leather to protect your feet, but you can cover the soles of your feet, and that this is the relationship between controlling the world and working on your own reactions to it.
What is exchanging self and other?
A practice in chapter eight in which the practitioner deliberately reverses the ordinary priority of self over others, imaginatively taking on others' suffering and giving away their own comfort. It later developed into the Tibetan practice known as tonglen.
Why is chapter nine so difficult?
Because it is a technical philosophical debate on emptiness, conducted against named Buddhist and non-Buddhist opponents whose positions the text does not explain. Without a commentary it is close to unreadable, and it is the chapter the tradition regards as the point of the whole work.
Which translation should you read?
The Padmakara translation published by Shambhala is the most readable and the usual recommendation. The Oxford edition by Crosby and Skilton works from the Sanskrit and is better for study. Serious readers eventually want both.
Are there passages that trouble modern readers?
Yes. Chapter eight includes extended meditations on the repulsiveness of the human body, written for celibate monks to weaken sexual craving, and the text elsewhere speaks harshly about the self. Both land very differently on a reader with body-image or self-worth difficulties.
Does the text ask for self-erasure?
The tradition says no, and the text can read that way in isolation. The intended target is the compulsive prioritising of oneself, not the person's legitimate needs, and every serious Tibetan commentary insists the practice requires a stable practitioner rather than a depleted one.
Do you need to be Buddhist to read it?
No. Chapter six in particular can be read by anyone as practical moral psychology, and its arguments do not depend on rebirth or on Buddhist cosmology. Other chapters assume a great deal more of the framework.
Who should read it?
Anyone with a recurring problem with anger, anyone interested in how a tradition argues its ethics rather than asserting them, and anyone approaching Tibetan Buddhism who wants the source most of its teachers are quoting.
Argument beats exhortation
What makes this text last is not that Shantideva was kinder than other writers. It is that he took his own advice seriously enough to argue for it, against objections, in public, for nine hundred verses. He assumed his reader would push back, and he built the pushing back into the text. You are allowed to do the same. Take chapter six and test it on the next thing that genuinely angers you, and if it fails, it fails and you will have learned something specific. A teaching that can be tested is worth more than one that only asks to be admired, and this one was written by someone who knew the difference.
Sources & References
- Shantideva. Bodhicharyavatara, eighth century.
- Padmakara Translation Group. The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala.
- Crosby, Kate and Skilton, Andrew. The Bodhicaryavatara, Oxford World's Classics.
- Traditional Tibetan commentaries on the ninth chapter.
- The Dalai Lama's published teachings on the text.
- Scholarship on Nalanda and the Madhyamaka philosophical context.
- Contemporary literature on tonglen and its prerequisites.