Shantideva

Shantideva (Sanskrit: Śāntideva; ; ; Шантидэва гэгээн; Tịch Thiên) was an 8th-century CE Indian philosopher, Buddhist monk, poet, and scholar at the mahavihara of Nalanda. He was an adherent of the Mādhyamaka philosophy of Nāgārjuna. He is also considered to be one of the 84 mahasiddhas and is known as Bhusuku. The Zhansi Lun of the East Asian Mādhyamaka identifies two different individuals given the name "Shantideva": the founder of the Avaivartika Mahāyānika Sangha in 6th century CE (in Samataṭa, modern Bangladesh) and a later Shantideva who studied at Nalanda in the 8th century CE and appears to be the source of the Tibetan biographies. Archaeological discoveries support this thesis. Two Tibetan sources of the life of Shantideva are the historians Buton Rinchen Drub and Tāranātha. Recent scholarship has brought to light a short Sanskrit life of Shantideva in a 14th-century CE Nepalese manuscript. An accessible account that follows the Butön closely can be found in Kunzang Pelden, The Nectar of Manjushri's speech. Shantideva was born in the Saurastra (in modern Gujarat), son of King Kalyanavarman, and he went by the name Śantivarman. According to Pema Chödrön, "Shantideva was not well liked at Nalanda." Apparently he was one of those people who didn't show up for anything, never studying or coming to practice sessions. His fellow monks said that his three "realizations" were eating, sleeping, and shitting. After being goaded into giving a talk to the entire university body, Shantideva delivered The Way of the Bodhisattva. The Śikṣāsamuccaya ("Training Anthology") is a prose work in nineteen chapters. It is organized as a commentary on twenty-seven short mnemonic verses known as the Śikṣāsamuccaya Kārikā. It consists primarily of quotations (of varying length) from sūtras, authoritative texts considered to be the word of the Buddha — generally those sūtras associated with Mahāyāna tradition, including the Samadhiraja Sutra. Shantideva is particularly renowned as the author of the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra.