Bodhisattva Vows: The Precepts and How Traditions Differ

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 October 2026

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The bodhisattva vows are the formal Mahayana commitment to become a buddha for the sake of all beings, normally received from a teacher in a ceremony, together with the code of conduct that comes with it. There is no single code. In China the mainstream code has been the Brahma Net Sutra’s ten major and forty-eight secondary precepts; Tibetan schools draw on Indian sources such as the Ākāśagarbha Sūtra and the Bodhisattvabhūmi; Theravada treats the path to buddhahood as a rare personal resolve.

What the bodhisattva vow is

The bodhisattva ideal itself is explained on buddhas and bodhisattvas; this page is about the commitment. Its root is bodhicitta, the mind set on awakening for others’ sake. Indian and Tibetan texts distinguish aspiring bodhicitta, the wish, from engaged bodhicitta, actually setting out. In Atiśa’s Lamp, and in Berzin’s Gelug presentation, the vow belongs to the second, engaged stage; other teachers also speak of a vow of aspiration (see “Aspiration and action” below). Atiśa’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment (trans. Patrick Dowd) puts it plainly: “Without the actual vow of engaged bodhicitta, your perfect aspiration will not develop further.”

The vow also has an unusual span. Teaching from Gampopa’s Ornament of Precious Liberation, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa as his office’s website styles him (Karma Kagyu), contrasted it with the vows of individual liberation (prātimokṣa): those “are indeed kept for the period of one lifetime,” while the bodhisattva vow is kept “from now until we reach enlightenment.” Alexander Berzin, giving the Gelug presentation, says the same: the promise applies to each lifetime until enlightenment.

In the Bodhisattvabhūmi, the vow sits on top of ordinary precepts, not in place of them. Michael Zimmermann’s study of that text finds that the first of its three kinds of conduct “corresponds in this scheme to the traditional prātimokṣa rules”, the lay and monastic vows, though, he adds, it is “different in its content from the traditional set”. Lay Buddhists’ version of those rules is the five precepts, and that page shows how one Tibetan master, Dudjom Rinpoche, layers lay, bodhisattva and tantric vows. (Japan’s Tendai school went the other way, as the East Asian section below shows.)

The sutras also tell of vows made by particular bodhisattvas, such as those of the monk Dharmākara, who became Amitabha, and Kṣitigarbha’s vow to rescue the beings in the hells. Those are stories of individual vows; this page is about the vow a practitioner takes.

Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, The Way of the Bodhisattva, gives the vow its best-known Indian wording, in the chapter where he formally takes it up. The famous aspiration to be “a boat, a raft or bridge” (3.18) has its own page, May I be a bridge. The vow comes five verses later, modelled on the buddhas of the past:

These two verses are not only literature. In the short Nyingma ritual by Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok on Lotsawa House, they form the core of the vow-taking. They are quoted here as Śāntideva’s text; this page gives no ceremony.

How the codes count

The commitment is shared; the rule lists are not. “Eighteen bodhisattva vows” is one code’s count, not every tradition’s:

East Asian Buddhism: the Brahma Net precepts

Ten major and forty-eight secondary precepts

The Brahma Net Sutra (Fanwang jing) is one of two major sources of bodhisattva precepts. The scholar Pei-ying Lin, introducing a 2021 feature in The Eastern Buddhist, counts it and the Yogācāra precepts of the Bodhisattvabhūmi as “the two major strands of bodhisattva precepts.” Its ten major precepts, in the English edition published by YMBA, are on killing; stealing; sexual misconduct; lying and false speech; selling alcoholic beverages; broadcasting the faults of the assembly; praising oneself and disparaging others; stinginess and abuse; anger and resentment; and slandering the Triple Jewel. Breaking one is a “Parajika (major) offense”. The five precepts page compares the first five with the Pali precepts in detail.

Then come forty-eight secondary precepts (the edition’s word). Trading in alcohol is a major precept, while drinking it is secondary precept 2, and the third secondary precept says a disciple “must not deliberately eat meat”. (On the practice today, see are Buddhists vegetarian? and Buddhism and alcohol.) The text asks that the full code be recited twice each month at the uposatha ceremony.

It sets few conditions on who may receive it:

“Whoever can understand and accept a Dharma Master’s words of transmission can receive the Bodhisattva precepts and be called foremost in purity.”

The list that follows runs from kings, monks and nuns to “a prostitute, a slave”, and “an animal”.

The Brahma Net is not the only East Asian code. Chung Tai Chan Monastery in Taiwan gave lay participants at its October 2024 transmission a set of “six major precepts and twenty-eight minor precepts”. The same count is found in the chapter on receiving the precepts of the Upāsakaśīla Sūtra (T1488), which lists six grave rules and twenty-eight lesser faults for lay followers.

Where the text comes from

The YMBA edition heads its text “Based on Kumarajiva’s text”, dates it to fifth-century China, and its introduction calls it “the second part of the tenth chapter of the Sanskrit text”. That is the tradition’s account. Scholarship differs: Lin treats the Fanwang jing as an apocryphal scripture composed in China (on what that means for the canon, see Buddhist scriptures).

Whatever its origin, it prevailed. Lin writes that since Zhiyi (538–597) wrote his commentary on the bodhisattva precepts, the Brahma Net precepts “have been the mainstream practice in China”; at least thirteen emperors received them between the fifth and eighth centuries, and the precepts were conferred on lay people while the Vinaya governed monks and nuns. In Japan, Saichō (767–822), founder of Tendai, designated the text to replace the Vinaya, and his successors ordained monks by Mahayana procedures instead. Lin says this approach shaped all later Japanese Buddhism (see Buddhism in Japan and Buddhism in China).

Zen communities have their own forms. San Francisco Zen Center uses sixteen bodhisattva precepts: three refuges, three pure precepts and ten grave precepts, taken at ordinations, weddings and funerals and renewed monthly at its Full Moon Ceremonies. Its fifth reads “I vow to refrain from intoxicants.” The three pure precepts correspond to a Mahayana triad Lin finds in the Bodhisattvabhūmi and in East Asian scriptures including the Brahma Net: restraint, accumulating wholesome qualities, and acting for the welfare of beings. In Zen, the lay ceremony of receiving the precepts, jukai, is also when a student receives a Dharma name.

The four great vows

In East Asian Buddhism the vow also takes the form of four lines, chanted in Zen and other communities. The wording took time to settle. Zhiyi gives the four in his Shi chan boluomi cidi famen (T1916), each in two wordings, the second introduced as “also called”, and pairs them with the four noble truths. His wording is not yet the modern one.

The form behind today’s chant is in the Platform Sutra, where Huineng leads the assembly in the vows (the Dunhuang version notes “chant three times”) and then turns them inward. In John McRae’s translation the beings to be saved are “the sentient beings of our own minds”, which Huineng explains as “the mental states of delusion, confusion, immorality, jealousy, and evil.” He insists: “Certainly it’s not me who’s doing the saving!”

English wordings vary by community. An article by Jonathan Kaigen Levy, a priest of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, on its website (dated 1 January 2023), gives this wording, and he says he has chanted the four vows “countless times”:

“Numberless beings, I vow to serve them. / Inexhaustible delusions, I vow to end them. / Boundless dharmas, I vow to practice them. / Unsurpassable Buddha Way, I vow to embody it.”

The same article offers “save” for “serve” and “be” for “embody”, and later renders the third line “Boundless Dharma gates, I vow to enter them”; other communities word all four differently.

Tibetan Buddhism: lineages and root downfalls

Two lineages, and a disputed map

Tibetan teachers trace the vow to India through named lineages, but draw the map differently. Teaching Gampopa’s text, the Karmapa, as his official site reports, described two traditions: the “profound view”, from Mañjuśrī to Nāgārjuna, and the “vast conduct”, passed “from Maitreya to Asanga and known as Master Serlingpa’s tradition.”

Berzin, giving the Gelug presentation, describes the source differently. He writes that Atiśa received the version all Tibetan traditions now follow from “his Sumatran teacher Dharmakirti (Dharmapala) of Suvarnadvipa”, whom Dowd identifies as Serlingpa, and that it derives from the Ākāśagarbha Sūtra as cited in Śāntideva’s Compendium of Trainings. The two accounts are not reconciled here. Dowd’s introduction to the Lamp says Atiśa received the bodhisattva vows from Bodhibhadra at Nālandā, then trained for twelve years with Serlingpa in bodhicitta and mind training, the system covered on lojong. (For the schools themselves, see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.)

Asaṅga’s chapter on conduct

A principal Indian source for the vow’s rules is the chapter on conduct in the Bodhisattvabhūmi, traditionally attributed to Asaṅga. Zimmermann, who speaks of its “compiler(s)”, finds there a ceremony for taking the vow, four major transgressions, and more than forty lesser ones. The four are praising oneself and belittling others; refusing goods to the needy or teaching to those who ask; failing to control anger towards others; and rejecting the bodhisattva teachings for others. A major transgression ruins the vow if it is done repeatedly and with strong involvement, or if the bodhisattva gives up the aspiration for awakening. The chapter addresses householders and renunciants alike. Zimmermann suggests, offering it as a possible assumption, that it was meant partly for lay followers who wanted to live as bodhisattvas.

Atiśa: who may take it, and from whom

Atiśa’s Lamp sets a condition the Brahma Net does not:

The next verse praises full ordination as supreme. Verse 22 says to take the vow “from a good, authentically qualified spiritual teacher” by the ritual of the Bodhisattvabhūmi’s chapter on discipline. Only if no such teacher can be found does Atiśa give another ritual; this page does not reproduce it. Dowd’s introduction notes that Gampopa’s, Tsongkhapa’s and Longchenpa’s stages-of-the-path works, classics of the Kagyu, Gelug and Nyingma, take their framework from the Lamp.

The eighteen root downfalls

Following Tsongkhapa’s fifteenth-century commentary, Berzin lists eighteen root downfalls, a version he says all Tibetan traditions currently follow. In short:

1. praising oneself or belittling others;
2. not sharing teachings or wealth;
3. refusing others’ apologies, or striking others;
4. discarding the Mahayana teachings and propounding made-up ones;
5. taking offerings meant for the Triple Gem;
6. forsaking the Dharma;
7. disrobing monastics or stealing their robes;
8. committing any of the five heinous crimes;
9. holding a distorted, antagonistic outlook;
10. destroying places such as towns;
11. teaching voidness to untrained minds;
12. turning others away from full enlightenment;
13. turning others away from their prātimokṣa vows;
14. belittling the śrāvaka vehicle;
15. claiming a false realisation of voidness;
16. accepting what was stolen from the Triple Gem;
17. establishing unfair policies;
18. giving up bodhicitta.

Berzin notes that a nineteenth, belittling others with sarcastic words, is occasionally specified. Set beside Zimmermann’s list, the first four cover much the same ground as the Bodhisattvabhūmi’s four. In Berzin’s account, sixteen of the eighteen become root downfalls only with four “binding factors”, such as seeing no harm in the act and feeling no regret, while the ninth and the eighteenth cost the vows at once. Without all four factors a vow is weakened, not lost. Even a lost vow is not the end in his account: someone who admits the mistake, applies the opposing forces such as regret, and retakes the vows “can recover and resume” the path. He adds forty-six faulty actions, and notes that traditions deriving from China keep variant versions.

84000’s introduction to the Ākāśagarbha Sūtra says authors of all Tibetan lineages refer to that sutra for the transgressions. It counts fourteen distinct ones: five for kings, five for ministers and eight for beginner bodhisattvas, four of the ministers’ repeating the kings’, and it notes the presentation “may vary depending on the different teaching traditions”.

Aspiration and action: one vow or two?

Schools also differ on whether the wish itself carries a vow. Berzin says the vows are taken “only” with engaged bodhicitta. The Karmapa divides the vast-conduct tradition into two parts, “aspiration of the bodhicitta vow and engagement of the bodhicitta vow”. Atiśa tells the aspirant to “fully uphold your precepts as instructed” (v. 18). Two Nyingma rituals on Lotsawa House take both together under the same heading, “Taking the Vows of Bodhicitta in Aspiration and Action Combined”: the short ritual by Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok, and one arranged in 1986 by Chatral Rinpoche in the tradition of Patrul Rinpoche. Bodhicitta also appears among the preliminary practices covered on ngöndro.

Theravada: the bodhisatta path

Theravada does not ask its followers to take a bodhisattva vow, and most do not. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that most Theravada practitioners aspire to become arahants, and that “a small minority” aspire to become buddhas, a path held to be harder and longer. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu argues that the school does not teach only the disciple’s path, and that many Theravadins have vowed to become bodhisattvas (his argument is set out on the six perfections). (See arahant, buddha and bodhisattva.)

The model is canonical. In the Buddhavaṃsa, which scholars cited by Jeffrey Samuels (Gombrich, Warder) treat as a relatively late addition to the Pali Canon, though he notes it may date from the third to second century BCE, Sumedha lies in the mud for the Buddha Dīpaṅkara to walk over. He could reach arahantship then, and declines: “What is the use of my crossing over alone” (I. B. Horner’s translation, quoted by Samuels; the Pali is Bv 2:56, on SuttaCentral). Instead he resolves to reach omniscience and carry the world across. Horner, as Samuels summarises her, distinguishes the silent resolve to become a buddha, made once, from the aspiration voiced before a living buddha and repeated before each one after. The lives that follow fill the Jātaka tales, and the qualities perfected along the way are the ten pāramī (see six perfections).

Samuels shows that the ideal did not stay in books. Some kings in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand openly declared themselves bodhisattvas; Samuels grants they may have been influenced by Mahayana ideas, but argues it is impossible to show they drew on Mahayana alone. The author of the Jātaka commentary closes his work with a vow to complete the perfections and become a buddha. His conclusion is that Mahayana applies the ideal to everyone, while Theravada reserves it for exceptional people. He quotes Walpola Rahula: Theravadins “do not stipulate or insist that everyone must become a bodhisattva”. For the wider contrast, see Theravada vs Mahayana.

When compassion outranks a rule

The Stanford Encyclopedia reports that for Asaṅga and Śāntideva, an advanced practitioner moved by compassion may sometimes break the ordinary rules, if doing so would do more to prevent suffering. It quotes Śāntideva, in Crosby and Skilton’s translation: “Even what is proscribed is permitted for a compassionate person who sees it will be of benefit.” The qualifier matters: the Encyclopedia frames these as cases in which “advanced practitioners” may violate the rules, not as a general licence. For the wider argument, see Buddhist ethics; for how such reasoning bears on killing, see can Buddhists be soldiers?.

How the vow is received

The texts above make the teacher the norm: a Dharma Master’s transmission in the Brahma Net, which allows receiving the precepts before buddha images only when no master can be found and an auspicious sign has been seen; a teacher at jukai in Zen; a qualified teacher in Atiśa’s Lamp, which allows another ritual only when none can be found. The setting can be large and public. At Leh, Ladakh, on 6 August 2012, the Dalai Lama gave the lay precepts and then the bodhisattva vows to the assembled public, telling them, as his office’s website reports, that he takes them afresh every day.

Beyond Śāntideva’s verses, quoted as literature, this page gives no ceremony. Anyone thinking of taking the vow should ask a teacher or temple in their own tradition; see how to find a Buddhist teacher and how to take refuge. The vow’s wider setting is covered in Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhist meditation.