The Bodhicaryāvatāra

"Śāntideva’s is a really interesting book. It’s so lofty, so aspirational, although there is some commentary in there; in some ways the traditional text is quite dry. But it’s so rich in terms of its intention; I feel really attracted to it, and like it sets a goal and a direction in life. In no way am I suggesting that I am living his ideals, moment to moment, day to day. I wish that I were that transformed. But I think there’s something really healthy about having a sense of direction in life. You know, just knowing where we’re going. Whether we think about it in terms of purpose or fulfilment, there’s the day-to-day kind of living, but also the where-we’re-going kind of living. I don’t see where we are going as a physical place, or a place in our career, or in our family, or anything like that. For me, it’s in our sense of purpose or intention, and I feel like that text, well, if we were to have a north star, that’s a really beautiful north star to have. Whatever you do, don’t sit down and try and read the book cover to cover. It’s not designed in that way. The instructions themselves are normally split up into four or five lines of text. The first time I read it, I read the commentary at the start. Then I tried to read a page or two a day. It might be I would only read four lines of text. Not even full page lines either, they’re what—10, 20 words? But for me, that is the purpose of the book. It probably took about a year to read it the first time, and once I found something that stood out, I would put a little mark by the side of that passage. I’m not a big believer in writing in books normally, I just don’t do that, but this is one book where I would so I could go back to it later. The purpose is not to read cover to cover; the purpose is to find out what is the essence you need in that moment that’s going help you live a happier, healthier life, and in turn to help others lead a healthier and happier life. And that’s enough. I still use the book in that way."

"The last book I’m recommending is the Bodhicaryāvatāra by the Indian philosopher Shantideva (Śāntideva), who lived in the 8th century CE. It’s ‘The Introduction to the Way of Enlightenment’, or ‘The Way of the Enlightened Person’. Despite the intimidating title, it’s actually a readable introduction to a certain kind of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. It’s rhetorically constructed in a really ingenious way: Shantideva leads you from encouragement to pursue enlightenment, through the various virtues that you need to cultivate in order to become an enlightened person, and then gradually, in chapters eight and nine, gives a really fascinating philosophical account of why the enlightened person will have compassion for the suffering of others. Shantideva presents an anti-substantialist view, arguing that there are no selves: there is suffering but the suffering doesn’t belong to any individual selves. So we have a reason to alleviate suffering, because suffering is undesirable, but we have no reason to prefer the alleviation of ‘our own’ suffering to the alleviation of the suffering of ‘others’ because there isn’t any distinction, ultimately, between our selves and the selves of others. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He gives a series of interesting arguments in support of these surprising conclusions. For example, he says: “Look, if you say that I shouldn’t be concerned about the suffering of another person because I don’t currently feel his suffering, why should I be concerned about ‘my own’ suffering tomorrow, because I don’t currently feel my suffering of tomorrow? Yet I do feel I ought to alleviate the suffering that ‘I’ am going to feel tomorrow.” He also argues that the ways in which we usually conceive of the self are illusory, by parallelism with other cases where we conventionally talk about something even though we recognise that ultimately it is not real. “Shantideva presents an anti-substantialist view, arguing that there are no selves” For instance, we talk about getting in ‘the line’ at the theatre, but when we think about it carefully we recognise that a line of people is not real. Intuitively, we might think of the people in the line as real, but we admit that the line is not a separate metaphysical entity on top of the people. Likewise, we talk about ‘armies,’ but an army isn’t real. The soldiers in the army we might think of as real, but the army isn’t a separate metaphysical entity on top of those soldiers. Then he applies these insights to the self: imagine your mental states over time. You could think of them as being in a sequence, and our tendency is to say: “here’s a sequence of mental events and I am what ‘has’ that sequence of mental events.” But the ‘I’ isn’t real; just the mental events are real. There isn’t an ‘I’ on top of or behind the mental events. You aren’t real any more than there is a line above or behind the people whom we describe as ‘in line.’ Likewise, at any one instant, there’s a collection of mental states and physical states that we conventionally refer to as ‘I’ or as our ‘self’. But that collection isn’t a real thing on top of the individual physical and mental states; it’s just a convenient way for labelling them. There isn’t a metaphysically distinct ‘I’ in addition to the physical and mental states any more than there is a metaphysically distinct ‘army’ in addition to the soldiers in the army. Shantideva’s ethical claim is that, once you realise that there is no self, that it’s just as illusory as a line or an army, you’ll recognise there’s no reason to prefer the alleviation of the suffering of this particular sequence of mental states or this particular arbitrary collection of physical and mental states over those of another. In a lot of ways, what Shantideva is doing is discovering more than a millennium earlier things that Derek Parfit argued for much later in the Western tradition. Shantideva undermined the conception of individual selves as a way of arguing in favour of a kind of universal compassion. But he did this not just through philosophical arguments, but also by presenting a theory of the human virtues and a theory of the order in which you need to go through them to achieve this understanding, which is both theoretical but also motivational. The Buddhists acknowledge that they’re asking you to engage in a radical restructuring of your motivations and your affective attitudes. They’re very conscious of that. They say we need to distinguish between merely saying that you believe something and actually fully believing it. Part of the goal of the book is to show you the path by which you gradually get to the point where these philosophical arguments are not only intellectually compelling, but also motivationally efficacious. This brings us back around to Hume’s Treatise again. As you noted earlier, Hume has a critique of the self that is very reminiscent of some Buddhist arguments, and we might expect this to lead him to a radical re-envisioning of our motivations and moral commitments. However, Hume famously says that ‘reflections very refined and metaphysical have little or no influence upon us,’ because after a few hours of dining, playing backgammon, and chatting with his friends ‘these speculations… appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous.’ In contrast, Buddhist philosophers suggest that it is possible to make their metaphysical conclusions become increasingly lively and persuasive. The Bodhicaryāvatāra itself is not primarily a practical handbook for meditation. It is more a philosophical account of the states that you’re going to develop in sequence as you get closer and closer to the ideal of absolute understanding, in which you perceive and respond appropriately to a world where there aren’t any selves. But there is a rich Buddhist literature on the details of ethical cultivation. An important part of it is precisely refusing to give in to the Humean temptation to wallow in our conventional passions and beliefs. When asked why he was not finishing his well-received History of England , Hume remarked: ‘I’m too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.’ This comment is charmingly frank, but it clearly does not illustrate the mindset that we would find in a Buddhist monk or nun seeking enlightenment. Shantideva actually discusses this. I think it’s a fascinating move, but the reader has to decide for themselves whether the argument is convincing. Shantideva says there are two levels of truth: there’s conventional truth and there’s ultimate truth. An example of a conventional truth would be something like ‘there’s a long line to get into the theatre,’ or ‘the Seventh Army has been mobilised.’ These are conventional truths because there isn’t a metaphysical entity ‘the Seventh Army,’ and there isn’t a metaphysical entity ‘the line’, but they’re useful things to say. Similarly, Shantideva claims that in order to speak in ordinary language you’re going to have to say things like, “‘You’ are going to have to cultivate compassion” and “‘you’ should alleviate ‘her’ suffering.” However, at the level of ultimate truth, we’re going to have to leave these verbal formulations behind. All verbal formulations try to isolate individuals as the referents of the substantive terms in the sentence, but according to Shantideva, there ultimately aren’t separate selves that could be the referents of the terms in the sentence. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Exactly, and when Buddhism arrived in China it had a fascinating and productive dialogue with Daoism. Zen Buddhism, for example, is in many ways a synthesis of Indian Buddhism with Chinese Daoism. Zhuangzi uses a metaphor to describe what also became the Zen Buddhist view of language: ‘A rabbit trap is for catching rabbits. Once you’ve caught the rabbit you can forget the trap. Words are for getting what they point to. Once you’ve gotten what they point to you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who’s forgotten words, so that I can have a word with him?’ This is almost exactly the simile that Wittgenstein uses in the Tractatus , where he says that his propositions are ‘elucidatory’ yet ‘senseless,’ so that one must use them to climb out of confusion, but then ‘so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it’. The Daoist work that most people in the West are familiar with is The Classic of the Way and Virtue , attributed to Laozi. It famously says, ‘Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know,’ and this is very reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s admonition, ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’ All of these works are expressing the view that we’re trying to get at something that is beyond the words, so we’re ultimately going to have to let go of the words. However, that doesn’t mean we’re going to sit there in silence. Wittgenstein wrote both the Tractatus and the Investigations , after all, and Zhuangzi, Laozi, and Shantideva have books attributed to them. We’re going to use words while knowing that they’re merely tools for getting us to an understanding for which the words themselves are inadequate. Just this: in today’s brief discussion we’ve seen that Mengzi offers a conception of human nature, the virtues, and ethical cultivation that is a plausible alternative to Aristotle. Zhuangzi offers challenging sceptical arguments, as well as a view about the limitations of language that is reminiscent of Wittgenstein. Shantideva offers anti-substantialist arguments about the self that rival those of Hume and Parfit. I give further examples of vibrant Chinese and Indian philosophical debates in my book, Taking Back Philosophy. If a contemporary Western philosopher looks seriously at any of these examples and still claims, “Well, that isn’t ‘real’ philosophy,” I can only accuse them of professional incompetence."