“All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.”
Śāntideva · Mahāyāna Buddhism
happinessethicslove
Paraphrase or translation
Philosopher
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Śāntideva
c. 8th century CE · Mahāyāna Buddhism · Medieval
Santideva was a Buddhist monk, associated in traditional accounts with Nalanda, who composed the Bodhicaryavatara, a guide to the path of the bodhisattva, around the eighth century. The poem is philosophical argument in verse. It defends the awakening mind, the intention to become a buddha for the sake of others, and it trains patience, carefulness, and a meditation that exchanges self and other.
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Chapter 6 argues that anger is a serious obstacle and that dejection is often useless. Chapter 8 presses the claim that the boundary selfishness relies on is less solid than it feels, and that joy and misery track the wish for others' good or the hunt for one's own pleasure. The Sanskrit text is stable enough to cite by chapter and verse.
English translations differ in sharpness. The Padmakara translation is one widely used version. Santideva is not offering statistics about happiness, and he is not offering a secular productivity tip. He is offering a discipline inside a Mahayana account of what a person is.
Three verse translations are included: 8.129 on joy, 6.10 on remedy, and 5.13, the leather soles, in the Padmakara Translation Group's English. Further short English lines would be padding. Read the chapters rather than hunting extra epigrams.
Start here
Bodhicaryavatara, chapters 6 and 8, in a named translation such as Padmakara
Those chapters contain the lines people already quote, and they show the arguments around them. A verse card without the chapter becomes a proverb he did not write.
Quotations
“If a problem can be remedied, why be unhappy about it? If it cannot be remedied, what use is being unhappy about it?”
Śāntideva · Mahāyāna Buddhism
mindresilience
Paraphrase or translation
“To cover all the earth with sheets of leather — where could such amounts of skin be found? But with the leather soles of just my shoes it is as though I cover all the earth!”
Śāntideva · Mahāyāna Buddhism
mindresilienceself
Paraphrase or translation
Key ideas
Awakening mind
Bodhicitta is the mind that aims at awakening for the sake of others, and the book treats it as the rational response to a porous boundary between self and other.
Patience
If a trouble can be remedied one should remedy it, and if it cannot, misery does not repair it.
Exchange of self and other
Meditation trains a reversal of the usual privilege of one's own pleasure, on the ground that suffering is not made less by whose it is.
Major works
Bodhicaryavatara (c. 8th century)
A verse guide to the bodhisattva path. Chapters 6 and 8 carry the quotations most often lifted out.
Siksasamuccaya (c. 8th century)
A compendium of training, also attributed to him, more technical and less often quoted in English.
Influences
- The Buddha
- Nāgārjuna
- Asanga
Influenced
- Tibetan commentarial tradition
- The Dalai Lama's teaching of the text
Common misreadings
- The verse on joy and misery is a finding one could check in a week, rather than a meditation instruction.
- The patience verse means that worry is always useless, dropping the demand to act when a remedy exists.
Famous lines Śāntideva never said
None of the lines this library files for Śāntideva is marked Questionable or Misattributed. That is only a fact about these cards. It is not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.
FAQ
What is the best book to start with?
Bodhicaryavatara, chapters 6 and 8, in a named translation such as Padmakara Those chapters contain the lines people already quote, and they show the arguments around them. A verse card without the chapter becomes a proverb he did not write.
What is the most famous quote?
This library does not measure fame, and it does not rank lines by how often they are shared. The first line it files for Śāntideva that is not marked Questionable or Misattributed is “All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.” (Bodhicaryāvatāra 8.129, Paraphrase or translation).
What is the most misquoted line?
None of the lines this library files for Śāntideva is marked Misattributed or Questionable. That is a fact about these cards, not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.
What is one key idea, in a sentence?
Awakening mind: Bodhicitta is the mind that aims at awakening for the sake of others, and the book treats it as the rational response to a porous boundary between self and other.