The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryavatara)

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 13 August 2026 · Updated 13 November 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

The Way of the Bodhisattva (Sanskrit: Bodhicaryāvatāra, “Introduction to the Conduct of the Bodhisattva”) is a Mahayana poem in ten chapters by the Indian monk Śāntideva, who probably lived between the late 7th and mid-8th centuries.

It is a guide to the bodhisattva path — the awakening of bodhicitta, the wish to become enlightened for the sake of all beings — and, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s words, it is “immensely popular in Tibet,” and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it “a key source for the entire Tibetan literary genre of blo sbyong or lojong” (see Tibetan Buddhism and our guide to Buddhist literature).

What the Way of the Bodhisattva is

The Bodhicaryāvatāra is not a scripture in the strict sense — not a sutra, not the word of the Buddha — but a named author’s composition, a work of luminous Sanskrit verse. In the Tibetan canon it belongs to the Tengyur, the collection of treatises and commentaries by the great Indian masters, as distinct from the Kangyur of the Buddha’s own word. What sets it apart from a dry treatise is its voice: Śāntideva writes in the first person, wrestling with his own mind, and the poem reads less like a manual than like the intimate journal of someone learning to love the whole world.

Śāntideva of Nālandā

Its author, Śāntideva, was by Tibetan tradition a monk of Nālandā, the great Buddhist monastic university of ancient India, and probably lived between the late 7th and mid-8th centuries CE: another Indian author, Śāntarakṣita, quotes him in a text that must have been composed by 763. The traditional story of his life is charming and almost certainly embroidered: his fellow monks are said to have thought him idle and useless — a monk who seemed to do nothing but eat and sleep — and to have invited him to teach as a humiliation, only for him to astonish them by reciting the entire Bodhicaryāvatāra from memory, rising into the air as he reached its soaring chapter on wisdom. The tale is hagiography (the Tibetan historian Butön, writing in 1322, gives the most detailed version), and scholars weigh the rest differently: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy finds very little historically reliable information about his life, while the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sees little reason to doubt that he was a monk at Nālandā. The poem itself is his enduring monument.

The ten chapters

The Bodhicaryāvatāra is arranged in ten chapters that lead the reader step by step into the bodhisattva’s life:

• It opens by praising bodhicitta, the awakening-mind, and the immense good of arousing it.
• It moves through confession of one’s failings and the taking hold of bodhicitta — the formal resolve to seek awakening for all beings.
• It turns to vigilance and the guarding of awareness (introspection), the alert watchfulness that protects the resolve.
• It then treats the perfections (pāramitās) — with especially celebrated chapters on patience (kṣānti, chapter 6), meditative concentration (chapter 8), and wisdom (prajñā, chapter 9, its great exposition of emptiness).
• It closes with a famous dedication of merit (chapter 10), offering the good of the whole work to the welfare of every living being.

(An earlier, shorter recension of the text is known from Tibetan manuscripts at Dunhuang, differing somewhat in length and arrangement; the standard version studied today is the ten-chapter text.)

The poem in its own words

Two freely readable translations are quoted below. Adam Pearcey’s, made from the Tibetan for Lotsawa House, covers the opening chapters; two later verses below come from his translation of Patrul Rinpoche’s commentary, which quotes them in full. For the middle chapters we quote L. D. Barnett’s The Path of Light, which the University of Oslo’s Bibliotheca Polyglotta prints verse by verse beside Minayeff’s 1889 Sanskrit edition, the Tibetan of the Tengyur (translated by Sumatikīrti and Blo ldan śes rab), the Tibetan of the Dunhuang manuscripts, La Vallée Poussin’s French and a Chinese version. Verse numbers below follow that Sanskrit edition.

Read the small print before you follow one of those links. Polyglotta’s English column is not one translator’s work, and its volume page says so: “The English references are to page and line number in Barnett (1947), alternatively to Matics (1971), if lacking in Barnett. If a Tibetan verse has no Sanskrit equivalent the English translation is from Batchellor (1979).” So the English printed beside any given verse there may be Barnett’s, Matics’s, or Stephen Batchelor’s. Every line credited to Barnett below has therefore been checked against Barnett’s own book: Polyglotta keys its English to his 1947 edition, and the 1909 edition is scanned in full at the Internet Archive. His Edwardian vocabulary — “righteousness”, “the Blessed”, “long-suffering” — is his choice and not Śāntideva’s; where that changes the sense, we say so.

Chapter 1 — the praise of bodhicitta

The image is metallurgical rather than medical, and the Sanskrit turns on one noun used twice: aśucipratimām imāṃ gṛhītvā jinaratnapratimāṃ karoty anarghām — this impure pratimā, image or likeness, is made into the priceless jewel-pratimā of a Conqueror. What the verse claims is a change of kind, not of degree: the same figure, revalued. The elixir is rasajāta, which Pearcey gives as “the alchemists’ supreme elixir” and Barnett, working from the Sanskrit, as “that exceedingly potent elixir!” — and where Pearcey leaves bodhicitta standing as a term, Barnett resolves it into English, “the Thought of Enlightenment”. Almost every choice a translator of this poem makes is of that shape. For the term itself, see bodhicitta.

Chapter 5 — guarding the mind

Barnett’s “rules” is śikṣā, the bodhisattva’s whole training rather than a monastic rulebook; his “thought” is citta, mind or heart. Both words stand twice in the Sanskrit of this one verse. Note the tension with the chapter’s own title: Polyglotta’s contents and the Sanskrit colophon both name chapter 5 Saṃprajanyarakṣaṇaḥ, the guarding of saṃprajanya — which verse 108 glosses as the repeated inspection (pratyavekṣā muhur muhuḥ) of the state of body and mind (kāyacittāvasthā) — and yet the first verse says the thing to be guarded is the mind itself. Everything after it argues that priority, including the much-shared verse about covering the earth with leather.

Chapter 6 — patience, and the enemy

The Sanskrit Barnett is rendering sits beside his English on the same page: sarvam etat sucaritaṃ dānaṃ sugatapūjanam | kṛtaṃ kalpasahasrair yat pratighaḥ pratihanti tat — a line where Polyglotta follows La Vallée Poussin and footnotes a different reading in Minayeff’s text, though not in either of the two words that carry the sense here. “The Blessed” is sugata, “well-gone”, an epithet of a buddha rather than a title of blessing; “ill-will” is pratigha, aversion, the mind’s recoil from what it will not have. Śāntideva puts this first in a chapter Polyglotta titles Kṣāntipāramitā, the perfection of patience: he names the price of anger before offering a single technique, which is how the chapter earns the effort it goes on to ask for. The idea is set out on our page on patience in Buddhism; this is the sentence it rests on.

The Sanskrit is blunter than “cherish”: spṛhaṇīyo mama ripuḥ — my enemy is to be longed for. And the line is a conclusion, not an aphorism. It arrives at the end of five verses answering the obvious objection, that an enemy obstructs one’s practice: Śāntideva keeps turning the word vighna, obstacle, over in 6.102–105, and settles it at 6.106 by observing that beggars are easy to come by in this world and offenders are not — sulabhā yācakā loke durlabhās tv apakāriṇaḥ. Lifted out of that sequence, as it usually is, the verse sounds like sentiment; in place it is the last step of a proof. Applied, it becomes our page on difficult people.

The heart: bodhicitta and exchanging self and other

If the poem has a single beating heart, it is the cultivation of compassion so radical that it dissolves the boundary between self and other. Its eighth chapter contains the meditation on exchanging self and other — training to cherish others as one now cherishes oneself, and to regard others’ suffering as one’s own to relieve.

This is not sentiment but a rigorous discipline, argued with a philosopher’s precision: if suffering is bad wherever it occurs, Śāntideva reasons, then there is no reason to relieve only my suffering and not yours. Scholars of Tibetan mind training connect this chapter with the practices known as lojong, and with tonglen — the practice of breathing in others’ pain and breathing out one’s own well-being.

The argument turns on one Sanskrit word doing both jobs. Avayava means “part” or “limb”, and Śāntideva uses it twice in the verse — kāyasyāvayavatvena … jagato ’vayavatvena — first of the body’s parts, then of the parts of jagat, the moving world. He is not saying that we are secretly one thing. He is saying that “body” is already a convention we have agreed to defend, so the boundary it draws carries no more authority than the wider one we might draw instead — reasoning that leans on his ninth chapter, on wisdom and emptiness, and on the older teaching of not-self. Six verses later he gives the practice its name and calls it the supreme secret: parātmaparivartanam, the exchanging of self and other (8.120).

This is the verse the Tibetan tradition treats as the warrant for doing the practice rather than merely agreeing with it. Patrul Rinpoche quotes it — as VIII, 131 — at exactly this point in The Brightly Shining Sun, his step-by-step guide to meditating on the poem, and then draws the instruction out of it: “we must give away our own happiness to sentient beings and take their sufferings upon ourselves.” That is tonglen.

The dedication: chapter 10

The final chapter is Pariṇāmanā, dedication — the turning over of whatever good the poem has produced to somebody else; the Sanskrit colophon names it so, bodhicaryāvatāre pariṇāmanā paricchedo daśamaḥ. Most of it is a long, concrete list of wishes for particular people: monasteries busy with recitation and study (10.42), nuns provided for and free of quarrelling (10.44), the badly behaved (10.45), scholars honoured and almsmen provided for (10.46). Then, near the end, comes the verse everybody knows — 10.55, which begins in the Sanskrit ākāśasya sthitir yāvad yāvac ca jagataḥ sthitiḥ.

We do not quote that one in English here, and the reason is worth saying plainly. Barnett’s The Path of Light runs from chapter I to chapter IX and then stops; there is no chapter X in it. The English Bibliotheca Polyglotta prints beside chapter 10 is therefore not his but the one it credits to Matics — a modern translation, and not among the editions this site may reproduce at length. In English, meet the verse in the Padmakara or the Crosby–Skilton translation.

What can be said about it from the Sanskrit is that it turns on one plain word used three times — sthiti, standing or remaining: of space, of the world, and of the speaker. It is a wish to last exactly as long as the problem does. And where it stands matters: it arrives at the end of that catalogue of wishes — for monasteries, nuns, scholars and much else — not as a poem on its own.

It is the line of Śāntideva most likely to be met on a card with no author’s name attached, and one the 14th Dalai Lama has cited to explain his own peace of mind. Opening a teaching given on 17 July 2020 he said “I’m inspired by verses by Shantideva”, and quoted two stanzas, of which this is the first. The verse that follows it in the poem is the one Patrul Rinpoche reaches for.

“Ripen” is not decoration. The Sanskrit verb is pacyatām, let it ripen, from the root pac that also gives vipāka, the ripening of karma; the Tibetan of the Tengyur has smin, ripen, in the same place. What is being asked for is that the results of other people’s actions fall due on the speaker. Patrul Rinpoche sets the verse beside a passage of the Precious Garland to the same effect, and offers the pair to anyone who cannot manage the full exchange meditation: the strongest form of chapter 8, given as a prayer rather than a technique.

How the translations differ

Chapter 10 verse 56 is the clearest place on this page to see why an edition has to be named. The Sanskrit and the Tibetan do not agree about who, in the second half of the verse, is to make the world happy.

The Sanskrit reads bodhisattvaśubhaiḥ sarvair jagat sukhitam astu ca — an instrumental plural, by the bodhisattvas’ śubha, which La Vallée Poussin read as their merits. The Tibetan of the Tengyur reads byaṅ chub sems dpa’i dge ’dun gyis | | ’gro ba bde la spyod par śog, and dge ’dun is the word Pearcey gives as “sangha”: a community of people, not an accumulated stock of good. The first three of those rows can be read in parallel columns at Bibliotheca Polyglotta, which does not carry Pearcey; his English is the one quoted above, from Lotsawa House. The numbering diverges too: on that same page the Dunhuang column keeps its own count, its verse 64 sitting opposite Sanskrit 10.56, and back at 8.114 its number is 44. So “Śāntideva 10.56” is only an exact address once you add whose edition it is, which is why every quotation above names one.

Why the Way of the Bodhisattva matters, and how to read it

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the Bodhicaryāvatāra “immensely popular in Tibet”, and notes that numerous Tibetan religious rituals quote from it or are influenced by it; it is a source for arousing bodhicitta and cultivating the six perfections. The 14th Dalai Lama has taught it many times, calling it a principal source of his own practice of compassion. (On the ideal it teaches, see buddhas and bodhisattvas.)

To read it, reach for a recognised translation and note its source language: the Padmakara version (The Way of the Bodhisattva) and Stephen Batchelor’s render the Tibetan, while Crosby and Skilton’s (The Bodhicaryāvatāra, Oxford) renders the Sanskrit — two valid titles for the one work. Read a few verses at a time, slowly; this is a text meant to be practised, not merely finished. Two versions can also be read online for nothing: Adam Pearcey’s opening chapters at Lotsawa House, and Barnett’s older English set against the Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese at the University of Oslo’s Bibliotheca Polyglotta — whose English column, be warned, switches to other translators wherever Barnett has no verse, and for the whole of chapter 10. For its author, see Śāntideva; for the perfections it teaches, the six perfections; and for the wider library, Buddhist scriptures.