Bodhicitta · Skt: bodhicitta

Bodhicitta is a technical term of the Mahayana, and it names a motive rather than a technique. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the commitment plainly: “A practitioner who is on the way to becoming a Buddha is known in Sanskrit as a bodhisattva”, and “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”. Bodhicitta is that vow held as an intention: to awaken fully, for everyone’s sake.

Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, the classic manual of the path, distinguishes two kinds. “Understand that, briefly stated, / Bodhicitta has two aspects: / The mind aspiring to awaken, / And bodhicitta that’s enacted” (ch. 1, v. 15, trans. Adam Pearcey). The difference is between wanting and doing: “Just as one understands the difference / Between wishing to go and setting out upon a journey, / The wise should understand these two, / Recognizing their difference and their order” (v. 16). Aspiring bodhicitta is the wish; engaged bodhicitta is the wish carried into practice, which is what the rest of Śāntideva’s text, covered in our guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva, goes on to train.

Traditions genuinely differ here. The Stanford Encyclopedia introduces the vow with the words “by contrast”, marking it as what sets serious Mahayanists apart from earlier ideals, and notes that mature Mahayana traditions hold that buddhas “will remain in cyclic existence until all sentient beings have reached liberation”. Bodhicitta belongs to that outlook, so it is best described as a Mahayana term rather than a general Buddhist one.