Shantideva c. 685 AD – c. 763 AD

Shantideva was an Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher of the Madhyamaka school. According to tradition, he was a prince who renounced the throne to enter the great monastic university of Nalanda, where his fellow monks considered him a do-nothing until he astonished them by delivering, in spontaneous verse, the Bodhicaryavatara, the Way of the Bodhisattva. The work has become one of the most beloved texts of Mahayana Buddhism, articulating in lucid and often moving language the practice of the six perfections and the cultivation of the awakening mind. His Siksasamuccaya is a companion compendium of Mahayana practice.

Shantideva is a Mahayana Buddhist monk and poet of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, traditionally dated around 685 to 763. The hagiographies preserved in Tibetan sources identify him as a prince of Saurashtra in western India who renounced his throne on the eve of his coronation, joined the great monastic university of Nalanda under the name Shantideva, and there composed his works in apparent indolence — much to the disquiet of his fellow monks until he recited the Bodhicaryavatara in public.

Two works are securely attributed to him: the Bodhicaryavatara, or Way of the Bodhisattva, a verse manual of Mahayana ethics and meditation in ten chapters, and the Sikshasamuccaya, a prose anthology of scriptural passages on the bodhisattva path that is also one of the most important sources for sutra literature now lost in the original Sanskrit. Both teach the path of the bodhisattva from Madhyamaka philosophical ground.

The ninth chapter of the Bodhicaryavatara, on emptiness, has been the focus of centuries of commentary — most famously by Prajnakaramati in India, by Patrul Rinpoche in nineteenth-century Tibet, and by the present Dalai Lama. The work has shaped Tibetan Buddhist training to the present day and has become a central text of contemporary engaged-Buddhist ethics.