Shantideva

Shantideva (conventionally placed in the late 7th to mid-8th century CE, c.685-763) was an Indian Mahayana monk, philosopher, and poet associated with the great monastic university of Nalanda. Little reliable biography survives apart from later traditional accounts, but his enduring importance rests on a single masterwork, the Bodhicaryavatara (“Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”), composed in Sanskrit verse around 700 CE.

The text is at once a devotional poem, an ethical manual, and a rigorous philosophical treatise in the Madhyamaka tradition of emptiness. At its heart stands bodhicitta, the “awakening-mind” that vows to attain buddhahood for the sake of all beings, and the radical meditative practice of “exchanging self and other,” in which one trains to regard the suffering of others exactly as one’s own.

For the mind-power lineage, Shantideva is a pivotal figure: he treats the deliberate cultivation of mental attitude, especially patience and compassion, as a discipline that reshapes one’s whole experience of the world, arguing that since we cannot cover the earth in leather we must instead cover our own feet, that is, transform the mind rather than the circumstances. His work became foundational to the entire Tibetan lojong tradition.