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The Training Anthology
of Śāntideva
The Training
Anthology
of Śāntideva
A Translation of the
Śikṣā-samuccaya
z
Translated by
CHARLES GOODMAN
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
In addition to other sources of the original text, this translation uses Sanskrit text from Śikṣā-
samuccaya of Śāntideva, first edition edited by Dr. P. L. Vaidya, second edition edited by Dr.
Sridhar Tripathi, published by The Mithila Institute, 1960; 1999
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Notes 361
Index 425
List of Abbreviations
BCA Vaidya, P. L., ed. 1988. Bodhicaryāvatāra of Śāntideva with the commentary
Pañjikā of Prajñākaramati. Darbhanga: Mithila Institute. English verses
cited are usually quoted or adapted from Crosby and Skilton, trans. 1995.
The Bodhicaryāvatāra. New York: Oxford World’s Classics.
DN Dīgha-Nikāya. See Maurice Walshe, trans. 1995. The Long Discourses of the
Buddha. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Edg. Edgerton, Franklin. 1998 (first published 1953). Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit
Grammar and Dictionary, vol. 2. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
ITD Duff, Tony. 2000–2014. Illuminator Tibetan-English Encyclopedic
Dictionary. Mac edition. Kathmandu: Padma Karpo Translation
Committee.
MN Majjhima-Nikāya. See Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans.
1995. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom
Publications.
MW Monier-Williams, Monier. 1995 (first published 1899). Sanskrit-English
Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press.
NTD Nītārtha Online Tibetan-English Dictionary, http://www.nitartha.org//
home.html.
PLV Dr. P. L. Vaidya. See Skt.
PT Peking Bstan ‘gyur, dbu ma ki. Draft of electronic edition, prepared by
Central University of Tibetan Studies; on file with the author.
Skt. The Sanskrit language, or the Sanskrit text used for this
translation: Vaidya, P.L., ed. 1999. Śikṣā-samuccaya of Śāntideva. 2nd
edition Tripathi, Sridhar, ed. Darbhanga: Mithila Institute.
SR Samādhi-rāja-sūtra
Tib. The Tibetan language, or the primary Tibetan text used for this
translation: Sde dge Bstan ‘gyur, dbu ma khi. Delhi Karmapae Chodhey,
Gyelwae Sungrab Partun Khang, 1985. Electronic edition, Tibetan
Buddhist Resource Center.
The Training Anthology in Its Cultural
and Religious Contexts
If these dates are correct, then Śāntideva lived during a period of conflict
and political fragmentation in North India, between the fall of Harsha’s empire
(647 ce) and the rise of the Pāla dynasty (around 750 ce).5 During this period,
Buddhism was still strong in North India, but had entered a period of decline that
would ultimately prove terminal.
At one time, the Buddhist monastic community had been lavishly supported
by a flourishing merchant class based in India’s trading cities. High-caste Hindus,
fettered by rules that forbade eating meals prepared on board a ship, were unable
to make long trading voyages. As a result, Buddhists enjoyed a dominant posi-
tion for centuries in the lucrative trade of the Indian Ocean. But the rise of Islam
brought powerful and aggressive Arab competitors who rapidly seized the lion’s
share of this trade for themselves. India’s total urban population decreased, and
the merchant communities that had supported Buddhist institutions withered.
Most of the Buddhist monasteries gradually disappeared; a few major ones sur-
vived, becoming major centers of higher education. These monastic universities
offered instruction not only in religious and philosophical topics, but in secular
subjects such as grammar, rhetoric, medicine, and astronomy, among others.
Among these, the greatest center of Buddhist learning and scholarship in all of
India was the massive complex of Nālandā, in what is now the modern Indian
state of Bihar, not far from the site of the Buddha’s Awakening. It was here that
Śāntideva studied, practiced, and taught.
The miraculous story of Śāntideva and his first teaching of the Introduction has
been told over and over: in classic Tibetan texts, in works of modern scholarship,
and by spiritual teachers from all the Buddhist lineages of Tibet. According to the
traditional account, Śāntideva was born a crown prince, but after extensive medita-
tion practice, he made a spiritual connection with the great bodhisattva Mañjuśrī
and eventually renounced the world. Śāntideva then took up residence at Nālandā
to pursue his monastic vocation.
Unfortunately, Śāntideva’s fellow monks were not impressed with his motiva-
tion to practice. They considered him so lazy that they began to refer to him as
a bhusuku. This is a kind of Sanskrit acronym composed of the first syllables of
words meaning “eat, sleep, and defecate”—because so far as they could tell, that
was all he ever did. In particular, Śāntideva did not seem to be engaged in the
central activity of Nālandā’s student monks: the memorization and recitation of
Buddhist texts.
Given that Śāntideva did not seem to be taking advantage of the remarkable
opportunity for study that had been offered him, the leading monks of Nālandā
decided, according to the story, to teach him a sharp lesson. They asked Śāntideva
to publicly recite a text of his choosing at an upcoming religious festival. And to
make the experience even more humiliating, they built an elaborate throne for
him to sit on while teaching.
On the appointed day, Śāntideva ascended the throne and asked the assembled
crowd whether they wanted him to recite something old or something new. That
is, he was asking whether they wanted to hear an already existing text that he had
memorized, or a text that he had composed. Amused, the monks asked him for
something new, and he began reciting the Bodhicaryāvatāra. It would have been
clear very quickly that this was one of the greatest works of poetry ever composed
in the Sanskrit language.
As he continued to recite, sitting in a meditation posture, Śāntideva rose into
the air, levitating above the throne. When he reached verse IX.34, he vanished
from their sight:
When neither entity nor nonentity remains before the mind, since there
is no other mode of operation, grasping no objects, it becomes tranquil.
The remainder of the Introduction was then recited to the crowd by a disembodied
voice from the sky.
Some readers may see it as superfluous even to investigate the truth of a story
as fantastic as this one; and a few others may be troubled by any attempt to raise
questions about so inspiring and sacred a narrative. Nevertheless, one question
seems hard to avoid: Where does the Training Anthology fit into the story? Verses
V.105–06 of the Introduction advise the reader to study either the Training Anthology
or another, similar text, the Sūtra Anthology (Sūtra-samuccaya), attributed to the
greatest of all Mahāyāna philosophers, Nāgārjuna. If we were to assume that the
miraculous recitation included these verses as we have them now, then Śāntideva
must have been able to take for granted that his readers had access to the Training
Anthology already. But if they knew about the Training Anthology—a huge collec-
tion of quotations from over a hundred scriptures, together with consistently in-
cisive, and often brilliantly illuminating, commentary by the author—how could
they have considered Śāntideva to be anything less than a great scholar?
If we leave the traditional story aside, charming though it is, what is the relation-
ship between the two texts by Śāntideva? We really have no way of knowing. For
example, it’s possible that Śāntideva wrote the Training Anthology first, and then,
drawing on the teachings he had gleaned from the many scriptural sources he had
consulted, went on to produce his own summary in verse of the teachings as he
understood them. Because of the discovery at Dunhuang, in the Xinjiang province
of China, of a different and significantly shorter version of the Introduction, most
scholars now believe that the Introduction was extensively revised sometime after
its initial composition, either by Śāntideva or by someone else. So we could hy-
pothesize instead that he wrote the Introduction first, then composed the Training
xii Cultural and Religious Contexts
Anthology, and then added V.105–06 while revising his first book. This latter pos-
sibility coheres well with an attractive analogy suggested to me by Jay Garfield.
He casually commented that the Introduction is like the textbook for a university
course, and the Training Anthology is like a coursepack with supplemental readings
(personal communication).
In terms of this analogy, what is the topic of the course? The answer, of course,
is that what Śāntideva wishes to teach is the path that leads from the reactivity
and confusion of ordinary life to the bliss, clarity, and compassion of Awakening.
Indeed, Śāntideva not only aspires to give us an intellectual understanding of how
Buddhism understands that spiritual path. He also wishes to equip us with practi-
cal tools for navigating obstacles on the way and to inspire us with motivation to
continue our journey regardless of difficulties.
In the section that follows, I explore a few aspects of the path to Buddhahood
as it was understood by Śāntideva’s sources: the sūtras of the Great Way, or in
Sanskrit, the Mahāyāna. I will then proceed to discuss some of the main features
of Indian Buddhist monasticism and of the cultural environment in which the
monasteries existed, before summarizing the intellectual frameworks that shape
the structure of the Training Anthology as a whole. Most of what I will present in
the following sections is relatively elementary in nature. Those readers who are
already familiar both with Buddhist teachings and with what is known about the
religious and cultural environment of first-millennium India may wish to skip the
rest of this essay and proceed to my discussion of the philosophy of the Training
Anthology.
Before we continue, let me explain how I will cite passages from the text in
these introductory essays. It has become common among scholars to refer to
passages in the Training Anthology by a set of standard page numbers based on
the pagination of the first modern published edition of the text, edited by Cecil
Bendall in the Bibliotheca Buddhica series, vol. 1 (1897–1902). I have obtained
these page numbers from P. L. Vaidya, who reproduces them on the margin of
his Sanskrit edition, which I have used as the basis of my translation.6 These stan-
dard page numbers can be found in the margins of this book as well, and I will
use them, rather than the page numbers of this book itself, to indicate where the
reader should look to find any given quotation.
6. See p. vii of PLV. For bibliographic information on this work, see under PLV in the List
of Abbreviations.
Cultural and Religious Contexts xiii
appropriate and legitimate one.7 Other texts accept the possibility of becoming
a Saint, but criticize this goal and those who aspire to it in fairly strong lan-
guage. The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti, for example, in a poem recommending
the path to the supreme enlightenment of Buddhahood as against the path to
Sainthood, asks:
And there is a third way of conceiving of the issue, found in the Lotus Sūtra and
in other texts influenced by it. In this view, there is no possibility of attaining
Nirvāṇa by following the path to Sainthood. The peace experienced by Saints
is a mere illusion; liberation from cyclic existence is possible only through
Buddhahood.
Śāntideva does not make it completely clear which of these views he adopts,
but he does include in his works a number of statements urging respect toward
those who follow Buddhist paths other than the one he recommends. For exam-
ple, at 98, he says: “Blessed One, if from this day forward, we treat people belong-
ing to the Way of the Disciples or the Way of the Solitary Sages with contempt,
thinking ‘We are special; they are not,’ we will have lied to the Tathāgata.” In the
BCA, verse X.50, Śāntideva says: “May Solitary Sages and Disciples be happy,
ever worshipped with great respect by gods, titans, and humans.”9 The belief in
the superiority of the Mahāyāna inculcated by the Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti,
whether or not it is accurate, may sometimes interact with the human tendency to
arrogance and pride and produce results very much at variance with the humble,
gentle, compassionate ideals taught in all forms of Buddhism.
Though they differ about the viability of the path to Sainthood, Mahāyāna
sūtras agree in teaching that the path to Buddhahood is long and difficult. Thus
at 108 we read the following, presented as an uncontroversial assumption to show
the proper attitude towards those less advanced in their training: “This religion
works in gradual stages; /No one can attain Awakening in one single lifetime.”
In the mature Indian Mahāyāna, the inconceivably long path to the distant
goal of Buddhahood is seen to have a clear and agreed-upon structure, in the form
of the Ten Bodhisattva Stages (Skt. bhūmi). Set out in the Sūtra on the Ten Stages,
these steps on the bodhisattva path are then clearly described and analyzed in trea-
tises such as Candrakīrti’s Introduction to the Middle Way (Madhyamaka-avatāra).10
Śāntideva takes it for granted that his readers will have some familiarity with this
framework.
In understanding the Ten Stages, we should keep in mind that the vast major-
ity of Mahāyāna practitioners have not yet reached them. Attaining even the first of
the Stages is sufficient for the practitioner to be considered a Noble One (Skt. ārya).
All of the Stages involve the possession of spectacular miracle powers, each more
impressive than the ones before. Those who, though aspiring to Buddhahood,
have not yet attained such an exalted level of practice can be referred to as ordinary
people (Skt. pṛthag-jana).
While still merely an ordinary person, and before entering the Stages, the prac-
titioner must generate an enormous quantity of goodness (Skt. puṇya) and pristine
awareness (Skt. jñāna). This process—known as the path of preparation—makes
it possible for the practitioner then to engage in the spiritual practices necessary
to progress further towards Awakening.
The term used to describe the two aspects of the path of preparation has
tripped up some scholars and puzzled others. For example, many translators have
rendered the Tibetan phrase tshogs gnyis as “the two accumulations.” But “accumu-
lation” is not at all a good translation of the underlying Sanskrit word saṃbhāra,
whose meaning is well revealed by its construction: saṃ ‘with’ plus √bhṛ ‘carry’—
that is, what you carry with you on a journey. So we might translate saṃbhāra as
the “provisions” for the journey; but the resulting image is overly and misleadingly
concrete. I have preferred to render the word as the “equipment” for the journey
to Awakening.
What are these two types of equipment? The practitioner must carry out ac-
tions that generate positive karmic results, or goodness, so as to have access to
the resources and opportunities needed to engage in spiritual practice in this and
future lives. But even a vast quantity of goodness is not enough to make it pos-
sible to transcend cyclic existence. The practitioner must also nourish the develop-
ment of a higher level of awareness. Some Buddhists would illustrate this process
of development by saying that whenever we put down our worries, desires, and
concerns, let things be as they are, and simply drop into the present moment, we
nurture our capacity for pristine awareness.
Both of these processes, of gathering goodness and nurturing pristine
awareness, need to be continued for a very long time and pushed to a very
high level before there is any possibility of making the transition to the first
bodhisattva Stage.
Yet despite the lofty nature of even the first of the Stages, countless aeons sepa-
rate the attainment of the first Stage from the “meditative absorption like a dia-
mond” (Skt. vajra-upama-samādhi) that marks the transition from the tenth Stage
to Buddhahood. These aeons are filled with disciplined and determined practice.
The remarkable scholar Jan Nattier, from whose insights into the Buddhist
tradition I have learned much, claims that this conception of Buddhahood as the
culmination of a cosmically vast and inconceivably demanding course of practice
was not shared by one crucial early Mahāyāna text: the Lotus Sūtra. She writes, “Its
claim that even a child who builds a stūpa out of sand and offers it to the Buddha
will eventually attain Buddhahood himself (i.e., the idea that Buddhahood is easy)
contradicts the dominant early Mahāyāna understanding of the bodhisattva path
as extremely challenging, even grueling, and suited only for ‘the few, the proud,
the brave.’ ”11 Here Nattier refers to a passage that happens to be cited by Śāntideva
at 92–94; this passage reads, in part:
Nattier is, of course, correct in pointing out that the strong bodhisattva universal-
ism of the Lotus Sūtra—the view that Buddhahood is the only liberation from
cyclic existence—is not widely shared among early Mahāyāna texts. Yet to con-
clude from passages like these that the Lotus Sūtra teaches that Buddhahood is
quickly and easily attained is a serious misinterpretation. The same quotation also
contains this passage:
Given that, according to the scriptures, the appearance of each Buddha in the
world is separated from the next by a minimum of thousands of years, to see ten
million Buddhas would seem to require a long period of spiritual practice!
In fact the conception of the path to Awakening in the Lotus Sūtra is consistent
with that in other Mahāyāna texts. Consider, for example, the story of the night
goddess Samantasattvatrāņojahśrī, from the Array of Stalks Sūtra.12 As the goddess
tells Sudhana,
And do not think it was anyone but I who was the daughter of the king
and queen, who in the time of the teaching left by the buddha Moonlike
Brilliance repaired a ruined image of the Buddha on a lotus. That became a
determining factor for me all the way to supreme enlightenment.13
Yet following that way, even under the influence of the crucial action that made
it possible, includes plenty of further effort and practice; as the goddess says,
“I propitiated all those buddhas, numerous as atoms in the polar mountain, and
honored them with all kinds of offerings. And I listened to their teachings, and
put their instructions into practice.”14 The goddess then goes on to describe her
further spiritual journeys at length and in detail.
Thus, the Buddhahood that is claimed to be the result of even minimal and
trivial-seeming Buddhist acts is still the result of an extraordinarily long period
of practice. It’s just that the initial religious action, once performed, initiates a
process that, perhaps through many twists and turns, and certainly through great
hardships and difficulties, nevertheless eventually leads in the direction of com-
plete liberation.
The early Mahāyāna conception of Awakening as an inconceivably distant goal
that can be attained only over cosmic timescales, and not at all in this lifetime,
did not continue to characterize that tradition as a whole. Later on it would be
rejected or reinterpreted in both the Zen and Vajrayāna traditions, which taught
methods of practice that were claimed to make it possible to awaken in this very
lifetime.
However the path to Awakening was understood by these various traditions,
though, a particular kind of social institution played a central role for all of them
in making it possible for significant numbers of people to follow that path. This
was the Buddhist monastery. Monasteries provide the background against which
12. Cleary 1993, pp. 1312–29. Note that Cleary cites a somewhat different version of this name
from the one found at Training Anthology 149.
13. Cleary 1993, p. 1325.
14. Cleary 1993, p. 1325.
xviii Cultural and Religious Contexts
many of the anecdotes and teachings in the Training Anthology unfold. There is
now an extensive literature, drawing on both textual and archaeological evidence,
clarifying how Indian monasteries actually functioned. Most of the discoveries
presented in this literature are not directly relevant to our text; I will present a very
selective, partial, and limited summary of some of the features of the social reality
of Indian Buddhist monasticism with which Śāntideva assumes his readers will
be familiar.
So the practice of meditation was highly valued, but the monastery was not the
primary site for this form of practice. Instead, monks and nuns would often go on
meditation retreats to caves or other remote sites.
The tasks necessary to keep Mahāyāna monasteries clean and functional and to
meet the needs of their practitioners would be performed by worker monks, and
Cultural and Religious Contexts xix
by all the monks through a system of work assignments. But due to the central
importance of meditation practice to the higher spiritual goals for which the mon-
astery was established, retreat practitioners were exempt from work assignments,
as the Training Anthology tells us at 55.
In the monastery, the monks and nuns would be held to strict standards of
moral discipline and dignified behavior by the monastic code, or Vinaya, and by
specialists in adjudication and enforcement of that code, often called Vinayadhara.
At a biweekly ceremony, monastic practitioners came together to recite all of their
commitments under the monastic code, with a pause between each rule during
which anyone who had broken that rule during the previous two weeks was ex-
pected to confess. The assembled monks, led by the Vinaya specialists, would then
determine the penalties to be imposed on the offenders.
Of these penalties, the most serious was the declaration that a monk or nun
had committed an “offense entailing defeat” (Skt. pārājika) and thus was asaṃvāsa,
“not in communion” or “expelled.” Scholars assumed for a long time that to be
“not in communion” meant that the individual was no longer a Buddhist monas-
tic and could no longer function as such in any Buddhist community anywhere.
Shayne Clarke, however, has discovered evidence suggesting that an asaṃvāsa
monk might, at least in some contexts, merely have been expelled from the par-
ticular monastery in which he had committed the offence, rather than from the
religious community as a whole—or perhaps even not expelled, but relegated to
a permanently lower status within that community.15 Short of being declared not
in communion, monks might be consigned to different kinds of probationary or
second-class status, or could receive various minor sanctions within the commu-
nity for corresponding violations.
Buddhist monks wanted the system of internal discipline within the religious
community to be the only one with jurisdiction over them. Several passages in
Chapter 4, including a verse by Śāntideva at page 66, forbid secular rulers to dis-
cipline monks who behave improperly. The verse describes the following as “root
downfalls” for rulers:
Europe. Under such an arrangement, the ordained persons could not be pros-
ecuted by the king’s courts; they would be punished for transgressions only by the
religious community. Conflicts about this issue between the Catholic Church and
various western European rulers were a major source of controversy during the
Middle Ages. For example, Archbishop Becket’s long quarrel with King Henry II,
which would lead eventually to Becket’s death at the hands of Henry’s knights,
was largely about whether royal or ecclesiastical courts could have jurisdiction
over crimes committed by men in holy orders.16 Exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdic-
tion over clerics survived in a few places until remarkably late. In Poland, Catholic
priests had immunity from state prosecution as late as 1925.17
Whether a system of this type was actually in force in any given Indian state is
another question. Indian Buddhist institutions were clearly in a far weaker posi-
tion vis-à-vis state authority than the Catholic Church was at the time when it had a
monopoly over western Europe. It is unlikely that the Indian Buddhist institutions
were able to extract such a substantial concession from very many Indian rulers.
The Training Anthology’s attempt to discourage state punishment of erring
monks is complemented by an attempt to induce in the whole Buddhist popula-
tion a wholly uncritical attitude of devotion towards those high-status monastics
who take on the role of teaching Buddhist doctrine. This norm is driven home
repetitively and with considerable rhetorical intensity at 96:
Those who find fault with the Dharma teacher’s way of life are reject-
ing the Dharma. Those who say “The Dharma teacher’s spiritual accom-
plishments are not completely perfect” are rejecting the holy Dharma …
Any monk or nun, Buddhist layman or laywoman, who thinks or says
“The Dharma teacher is this” or “is like this,” is rejecting all of the holy
Dharma.
Skeptical readers might ask whether these exhortations might be driven by ig-
noble motives of institutional self-protection. Doubters might also point out that
similar norms in the Catholic Church played a crucial role in making possible the
scandals that have recently racked that institution.
A more sympathetic reading of the intention of these passages would be that
those who have put the teachings of the Buddha into practice and tasted the ben-
efits that flow from those teachings will naturally have deep-rooted feelings of re-
spect and gratitude towards those who transmitted the teachings to them. Such an
attitude of respect and gratitude would stop practitioners from lightly pointing out
the shortcomings of their teachers. Conversely, being quick to carp and criticize
would be an indication of a failure to appreciate the value of the teachings.
The kind of monastic teacher at issue in the passage from 96, called in Sanskrit
a dharma-bhāṇaka, would have been involved in giving sermons to large audi-
ences of monks, nuns, and, often, laypeople. More direct and personal instruction
was also available, though, and played a quite central role in monastic training.
Each newly ordained practitioner in an Indian Buddhist monastery would be as-
signed to work with two teachers, known as the student’s ācārya and upādhyāya.
The Training Anthology repeatedly refers to the close relationships that would de-
velop in this kind of educational context, and to the great respect students were
expected to show towards these teachers.
It is not entirely clear what the differences between the roles of ācārya and
upādhyāya were. The Pāli-English Dictionary, commenting on the Pāli equivalents
of these words, refers to “the ācariya being only the deputy or substitute of the
upajjhāya.”18 The great Theravādin writer Buddhaghosa, on the other hand, tells
us that the ācariya was responsible for instructing the student in those aspects of
the Buddha’s Dharma that could be conveyed through verbal teachings, whereas
the upādhyāya had the task of examining the student’s good and bad behavior and
guiding him onto the right path.19
So how should we translate the compound ācārya-upādhyāya, found sev-
eral times in the Training Anthology? The interpretation of the Pāli-English
Dictionary might justify some such translation as “teachers and assistant
teachers,” whereas the interpretation of Buddhaghosa would underly the more
common rendering, “teachers and preceptors.” Yet since the term “preceptor”
is archaic, and the idea of respect for teachers is one that is applicable outside
a monastic context, I have chosen to render the compound as “spiritual and
academic teachers.” In some respects, this translation also fits the interpreta-
tion of Buddhaghosa.
The great respect and devotion that the Buddhist texts recommended towards
the monastery’s spiritual teachers, when actually present among the surround-
ing laity, may have made it easier for the monks to obtain the material resources
necessary to sustain their own practice. Indian Buddhist monks lived by begging
from the laity; indeed, the Sanskrit word for “monk,” bhikṣu, literally means
“beggar.” From the normative perspective of the texts, and to some extent in
reality, the primary mode of obtaining donations of food and other necessi-
ties was the alms-round. In the morning, monks would walk slowly through
an inhabited area, carrying their bowls, and providing an opportunity for lay
people to make gifts to them. Strict and detailed rules, some laid out in the
Training Anthology at 131 and at 268–269, forbade the monks from asking for
what they needed, or even hinting at what they would like to receive; they were
required to wait for the laity to give on their own initiative. Separately from the
alms-round, though, major Indian monasteries had land and endowments,
including money to lend at interest, and often received large gifts; from these
resources, they were often able to provide rations of rice and other foodstuffs
to the monks in residence.
Lay people were motivated to make donations in the belief that doing so would
generate goodness that would lead to good fortune in this life and favorable re-
births in the future. Indian Buddhists held that this goodness would depend on
the degree of spiritual development of the recipient; giving to a morally disciplined
monk was better than giving to an immoral monk, and giving to an accomplished
meditator was better than giving to a lowly student. Indeed, a crucial part of this
view was that when a monk or nun reached a high level of spiritual development,
the lay donors who had made their practice possible would benefit greatly. So we
read at 138:
And for those donors and patrons whose gifts are eaten, there is a great
prize, a vast amount of goodness that results from the evolution of that.
Why is this? Because, of all the bases for goodness that consist of ma-
terial things, the highest are those which [support someone in] attaining
the mind of lovingkindness. Kāśyapa, when a monk obtains robes, alms-
food, {beds, and other necessities} from a donor, a patron, and after con-
suming them, attains immeasurable mental freedom, for that donor, that
patron, an immeasurable result of evolution of goodness may be expected.
Kāśyapa, it is possible that all the great oceans in the three-million-fold
world-realm might dry up, but the flow of goodness from that action could
never dry up.
In this way, the laity and the monastic practitioners within Indian Buddhist re-
ligious communities understood themselves to be mutually interdependent. The
laity would provide gifts of food, clothing, beds and seats, and medicine for the
sick. Through their study, meditation practice, and observance of their commit-
ments, the monks would make it possible for these gifts to generate vast goodness.
And the monks would provide the laity with the “gift of dharma” in the form of
advice and teachings given to the laity at appropriate times.
Given this interdependence with the lay world, the worldview of Buddhist
monks would inevitably be shaped and influenced by the broader surrounding
culture, which was largely non-Buddhist in outlook. The next section briefly and
selectively discusses a few of the features of Indian culture as a whole that left
their mark on the Training Anthology and its teachings.
Cultural and Religious Contexts xxiii
laborers. In this system, valorized by the traditions that would come to be known as
Hinduism, castes were understood to be hereditary and unchangeable. Moreover,
people were expected to marry within their own caste. Outside the system of four
castes were tribal peoples living in wilderness areas. But another group was out-
side the system in a much more problematic way: the untouchables, or Caṇḍālas.
These despised outcasts were required to perform what were seen as the most
degrading tasks, such as cleaning latrines and making leather. Brahmins could
not come into physical contact with them, on pain of becoming ritually impure, a
status which could be removed only through complex ceremonies of purification.
In some parts of South India, even coming into the vicinity of an untouchable was
seen as defiling to a Brahmin, so that the wretched untouchables were expected to
ring bells wherever they went in order to warn of their defiling presence.
Buddhism is sometimes characterized as having rejected the caste system.
This claim is a grave oversimplification that nevertheless contains important ele-
ments of truth. The Bhagavad Gītā upheld the caste system as divinely created and
ordained, but Buddhist texts claimed that it was a social construction, created by
humans. And whereas the Gītā described the system as based on the fundamen-
tally different natures of different types of humans, Buddhism argued for a basic
moral equality among all people.21 With these reservations, Buddhists accepted that
caste was how their society worked, and did not propose to abolish it. Indeed, most
Indian Buddhists seem to have considered themselves as belonging to a caste.
Though Buddhists did not want to get rid of caste, they did want to reform the
system. If humans had created it, then humans could change it. The historical
Buddha seems to have rejected the very idea of a hereditary caste of religious pro-
fessionals;22 so he attempted to redefine the term “Brahmin,” arguing that people
should earn their right to that title through their actions and spiritual accomplish-
ments, not through a mere accident of birth. Moreover, Buddhists were able to see
the needless suffering caused by the concept of untouchability, and they wished to
abolish the category. To the Buddha, no one was untouchable.
Throughout the history of Buddhism in South Asia, the subcontinent was
characterized by considerable religious diversity. For the most part, members of
different Indian religions lived together in harmony and extended to each other
a remarkable degree of toleration, contrasting sharply with the intolerance so
prevalent in Europe and the Middle East after the rise of Christianity and the reign
of Emperor Constantine. However, this toleration was occasionally broken by in-
cidents that leave traces in the texts. The Ākāśagarbha Sūtra, quoted at Training
21. See, e.g., Thompson 2008, p. 85; and the Madhurā Sutta, MN 84, Ñānamoli and Bodhi
1997, pp. 698–703.
22. See, e.g., the Tevijja Sutta, DN 13, Walshe 1995, p. 192.
Cultural and Religious Contexts xxv
Moreover, noble sir, in the future there will be family priests of warrior-
nobles who are really untouchables; ministers who are untouchables; mili-
tary officers who are untouchables—fools who think they are wise men, of
great wealth, with lavish lifestyles. They will show the world great meritori-
ous acts of generosity. Drunk with the intoxication of giving things away,
puffed up with the intoxication of pride, they will divide the religious wan-
derers from the warrior-nobles and the warrior-nobles from each other.
Through their influence with the warrior-nobles, they cause the religious
wanderers to be beaten and violently seize their wealth. By this use of vio-
lence, the [ministers] force the monks to offer them personal property, the
property of the religious community, the property of the religious com-
munities in the four directions, stūpa property, or other property stolen by
religious wanderers, as bribes. The untouchables will then give that to the
warrior-nobles.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this passage is that its denunciation of the
instigators of the persecution is phrased in terms of caste—indeed, in terms of
untouchability—despite the rejection of the normative legitimacy of that cat-
egory in most of the Buddhist texts that consider it. Apparently, allegiance to the
Buddhist tradition did not automatically immunize Indians against an attitude
of contempt towards those classified as “untouchables.” On the other hand, the
Training Anthology repeatedly mentions untouchables in a somewhat more posi-
tive light, as models for the humility that bodhisattvas should learn to develop.
One of the most obvious aspects of most of the non-Buddhist religious tra-
ditions of India, throughout their history, has been their belief in a vast profu-
sion of gods. The Vedic texts that provide our earliest significant evidence about
Indian religion are, for the most part, straightforwardly polytheistic. In addition
to the Vedic gods, people in early India propitiated an immense number of local
gods and spirits, many of them unheard of beyond a single village. By the time of
the Buddha, monotheistic and monistic intellectual currents had begun to flow
through Brahmanical religion; these would eventually come to dominate the phi-
losophy of the tradition we now call Hinduism. According to these new religious
ideas, all of the many gods were manifestations of a single divine principle: either
a personal God, often the great deity Viṣṇu, or an impersonal essence, typically
called Brahman.
While explicitly rejecting the new doctrine of monotheism, Buddhists in India
had no qualms about accepting the existence of many gods, but they mostly as-
signed to these gods a rather marginal and unimpressive role in their religious
xxvi Cultural and Religious Contexts
beliefs and practices. The gods, in Indian Buddhism, are immensely powerful,
knowledgeable, and long-lived, but they are mortal: they were born and will one
day die. Moreover, they do not know how to find liberation from cyclic existence,
and as such, have no ability to contribute to a practitioner’s salvation from suffer-
ing. The Pāli Canon and the Mahāyāna sūtras portray the Buddha as often inter-
acting in various ways with a variety of gods and spirits. These texts are careful,
though, to make the relative status of these figures quite clear: The Buddha does
not worship the gods. Instead, they worship him. They are prisoners in cyclic
existence, whereas he has transcended the entire cycle. One consequence of this
relatively marginal role played by the gods is that if they happened not to exist,
almost none of the central truth-claims of the Buddhist tradition would be called
into question by their absence.
Nevertheless, while Indian Buddhists were urged not to worship the gods,
many of them may have aspired to be reborn as gods. The Training Anthology
repeatedly mentions this kind of rebirth as one of the possible results of whole-
some actions. Here there is a basic distinction between three kinds of god-
realms: those that are part of the world of desire, realms of form, and formless
realms. Divine rebirth within the world of desire, characterized by a profusion
of sensual pleasures, is the karmic result of generosity, moral discipline, and the
practice of the four immeasurable emotions of lovingkindness, compassion, joy,
and equanimity. Rebirth in the form and formless realms, on the other hand, is
the result of very advanced meditation practice that is not accompanied by liberat-
ing insight.
Within this broad threefold categorization are many subtypes of Buddhist
heavens and their divine inhabitants. In the Training Anthology we find references
to such realms as the Tuṣita heaven and the heaven of the thirty-three gods. The
“gods controlling others’ emanations” are particularly powerful. The title Brahmā,
which Hindus believe names a creator God, one of the three persons of the Hindu
Trinity, was applied by Buddhists to a number of different gods. The Training
Anthology also refers several times to Indra, the leader of the Vedic pantheon,
calling him sometimes by that name and sometimes by such aliases as Śakra and
Kauśika. He is portrayed as leading the gods in their great battles against their
rivals, the titans (Skt. asura).
The Training Anthology thus reflects, in a number of ways, the values and be-
liefs of the surrounding and largely non-Buddhist culture from which it emerged.
But its primary focus is on the practices that must be followed and on the virtues
that must be developed in order to realize a distinctively Buddhist ethical and
religious ideal. Indeed, as we will shortly see, the structure of the text as a whole
and its division into chapters are based on a complex and interlocking set of clas-
sifications that together present a comprehensive picture of a path of Buddhist
practice.
Cultural and Religious Contexts xxvii
In this verse, we have a classification of four activities that the practitioner should
carry out with respect to three objects. The multiplication of these categories leads
to twelve main topics to be considered.
In Sanskrit, the four activities are utsarga, translated as “giving away”; rakṣā,
translated as “protecting”; vṛddhi or vardhanam, translated as “enhancing”; and
śuddhi or pariśuddhi, translated as “purifying” or “clearing away.” I regret the fact
that I have been unable to use one consistent translation for the fourth of these
terms and their verbal relatives. Whenever possible I have translated these with
forms and derivatives of English “to purify.” But the attempt of many translators
to create exact parallels to the Sanskrit usages of this term is blocked by a feature
of the semantics of the English verb. The direct object of “to purify” is always that
which becomes pure, that from which impurities are removed. So if you start with
hatred, and you purify that hatred, you end up with pure hatred. To deal with this
problem, I have had to find an expression in English that can take as its direct
object that which is removed; I have chosen “clear away.” Scholarly readers should
be aware of the Sanskrit underlying this expression.
Barbra Clayton has shown how almost all of the Training Anthology’s chapters
are organized in terms of the framework of verse 4.23 Following Bendall, she un-
derstands this structure as based on the three activities of protecting, purifying,
and enhancing; so for Clayton, the framework has only nine components. Ch.
2 begins with a verse about protection and analyzes the topic of protection in
general. A verse at the beginning of ch. 3 defines the “protection of the body” as
“giving up what is harmful”; chs. 3–5 then go on to discuss how to give up what
is harmful. Ch. 6 focuses directly on other aspects of the protection of the body,
whereas ch. 7 discusses the protection of the other two objects, possessions and
goodness. The chapters from 8 through 13 can all be understood as explaining
various aspects of purification; chs. 14 and 15 then directly address the purification
of the three objects. Chs. 16–19 are all devoted to various aspects of enhancement.
The first part of Ch. 16 explains how to enhance the body and possessions; it then,
along with the following three chapters, addresses ways of enhancing goodness.
Clayton regards ch. 1 as “Introductory,” and therefore as outside the frame-
work. But note that ch. 1 is about generosity and that it discusses the practice of
giving away each of the three objects: the body, possessions, and goodness. Thus,
if we include giving away as one of the activities, as Tibetan scholars would, then
the resulting twelvefold framework would cover every chapter in the Training
Anthology.
There is another and far more famous list that, though a bit less central to the
Training Anthology than the framework in verse 4, also plays a crucial role in the
structure of the text. This is the six perfections, six qualities that a practitioner who
wishes to become a Buddha must cultivate and, eventually, must develop to such
a high degree as to transcend ordinary conceptions of what they involve. This list
occurs many times in the Training Anthology, for instance at 16 and at 37. As trans-
lated in this book, the list of the six perfections is as follows:
The titles of c hapters 1, 5, 9, and 10 refer directly to a total of four of these six
qualities. A bit less obviously, chs. 12–13 are devoted to the perfection of meditative
stability, whereas ch. 14 expounds the perfection of wisdom. Meanwhile, of the ten
chapters of the Introduction, four derive their names from the perfections. So the
use of the list of six perfections as a framework for the organization of material is
a thread that unites Śāntideva’s two works.
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