Reddit reviews A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

I don't think there is one, though it would be an appropriate work to eventually receive such a treatment.

There are only really three (published) English versions to speak of: by the Padmakara Translation Group,
Vesna Wallace, and Crosby and Skilton. I can't vouch for any of them.

Of course! Thank you for giving me an opportunity to be helpful. A couple of the links I added refer to A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life by Shantideva. There is also a commentary version by The Dalai Lama called For The Benefit of All Beings. Also of interest: The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha and Cultivating Compassion: A Buddhist Prespective. Last but NOT least, an important summary work, which gets to the heart of Santideva's ancient treatise is Dilgo Khyentse's masterpiece, The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva. I'm providing Amazon links but please feel free to shop anywhere you like. :)

Reading is very good! These will definitely help. If I had to pick one I might go with Dilgo Khyentse's book. But it's up to you.

The best thing you can do is to begin a regular practice. A link in my previous comment talks about 6 cause meditation - and here I'm going to talk about Metta meditation - or Loving-kindness meditation. These are transformative practices that can bring a new understanding, and a new heart.

To practice loving-kindness meditation, sit in a comfortable and relaxed manner. Take two or three deep breaths with slow, long and complete exhalations. Let go of any concerns or preoccupations. For a few minutes, feel or imagine the breath moving through the center of your chest - in the area of your heart.

Metta is first practiced toward oneself, since we often have difficulty loving others without first loving ourselves. Sitting quietly, mentally repeat, slowly and steadily, the following or similar phrases:

May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.


While you say these phrases, allow yourself to sink into the intentions they express. Loving-kindness meditation consists primarily of connecting to the intention of wishing ourselves or others happiness. However, if feelings of warmth, friendliness, or love arise in the body or mind, connect to them, allowing them to grow as you repeat the phrases. As an aid to the meditation, you might hold an image of yourself in your mind's eye. This helps reinforce the intentions expressed in the phrases.

After a period of directing loving-kindness toward yourself, bring to mind a friend or someone in your life who has deeply cared for you. Then slowly repeat phrases of loving-kindness toward them:

May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.

As you say these phrases, again sink into their intention or heartfelt meaning. And, if any feelings of loving-kindness arise, connect the feelings with the phrases so that the feelings may become stronger as you repeat the words.

As you continue the meditation, you can bring to mind other friends, neighbors, acquaintances, strangers, animals, and finally people with whom you have difficulty. You can either use the same phrases, repeating them again and again, or make up phrases that better represent the loving-kindness you feel toward these beings.

This is a meditation practice you can undertake daily. This is my wish of compassion for you.

For the benefit of all sentient beings.

>Your response implies that Theravada is like the tree-trunk, while Mahayana starts at the point the branches shoot out in various distinct directions

Not really my intent... I would say that it is better to say that Theravada is a collection of specimens taken from a particular forest at a particular place and time. The Mahayana is a much larger collection of specimens, taken from many more locations over a much larger period. The movement from oral to written tradition complicates the situation, as does Sri Lanka's geographic isolation.

>Naively, I would argue that if that is the case, then should be at least some "common ground" introduction to this collection of Sutras that "all of Mahayana" accepts.

Something like Santideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life may fit best with what you are looking for- it isn't a summary of sutras, but rather a summary of the thought of a particularly prominent school of Indian Mahayana. Manuals like this are a good example of the kind of texts that emerge in the Mahayana tradition and become very important in terms of the education of monks and practitioners, maybe more so than the sutra texts. At its greatest extent, with the Mahayana we're talking about a library's worth of texts that were preserved, composed, and debated over across a large geography and a long period of time. Only a subset of those texts survived transmission to Tibet and East Asia and were then organized and collected in the ways that made sense to their interpreters and translators. A specific text might be of central importance to one tradition, and collecting dust on a shelf in the others.

>Makes one wonder whether the proliferation of teachings, texts, and orientations evident in Mahayana is principally contradicting of the Buddha's teaching.

I think this is a somewhat common sentiment among people who are impressed by the clarity of the Theravada texts, but to me it's something of an unjustified leap. Within the Theravada canon, the Buddha remarks that the teachings that he has delivered are like a handful of leaves in a forest compared with what the Tathagata actually knows and perceives. The Pali Mahaparinibbana Sutta also records that not all of the Buddha's students gathered together for the first recitation of the canon, with some groups breaking off to preserve their own version of his teachings.

The early texts have a lot of repetition and enumeration that can clearly be seen as aides to memory for oral transmission- I have some doubts that the Buddha taught that way in the first draft. The giant lists of gods and bodhisattvas in Mahayana texts are often dismissed as exaggeration, but might also reflect the real popularity and scale of the Buddhist community once the great monastic universities of India were up and running. There are also big lists of gods and worshipers in the Pali Canon in places, but that seems to be ignored- I think a Western tendency to cut out the supernatural and cosmological features of the Pali Canon makes the Mahayana canon look more strange by contrast. The Theravada texts that you mention both come out of a Sri Lankan tradition that has made an active effort since the 19th Century to de-emphasize aspects of the tradition that are challenging to Western skeptics and emphasize the rational and ethical teachings- if you add back into the Pali Canon the things that are omitted, the Theravada Canon and Mahayana Canon start to look quite a bit more alike.

On the other hand, there are Mahayana teachings that are clearly directed at disrupting excessive attachment to the method of categories and enumeration that is found in the Agamas/Pali Canon... Something like the Diamond Sutra can be seen as a corrective to the human tendency to confuse categories for real things. The history of preservation and transmission for such a teaching might be quite different from the history of the Pali Canon, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't be regarded as having the same authority. Whenever it was first written down, it seems to have been widely accepted by the community as having been something taught by the Buddha himself.

When we look at any sutra, we have to remember that according to our best evidence we are not seeing the verbatim words of the Buddha- more likely there was a 'seed' teaching that was preserved orally and elaborated and recorded according to the poetic and linguistic fashions of the time. Some 'seeds' may have been preserved orally longer than others, while some may have been subsequent creations by students. The early versions of the Abhidharma or 'matrika' (matrix) texts speak to this possibility.

I feel for you. Suffering is no fun. What helps me:

All pain is not suffering. Pain and suffering are two different phenomena. The dialogue on the two arrows, SN 36.6, addresses this issue, and it is worth bearing this in mind. This is not to belittle your predicament, or to claim that I understand the nature of your pain, but to put pain and suffering into a beneficial perspective. A perspective that allows us to begin to work with the situation.

In a general Buddhist perspective, as you know, we are all in some kind of state of perpetuated suffering with differing degrees of temporary relief or intensity. All life is suffering, pleasure and pain experiences are equally marked by this essential truth. That being the case, we are encouraged to learn to become unattached to our deep aversion to perceived pain, and attachment to perceived pleasure. There are ways to do this in a healthy, liberating way regardless of our situation.

Bringing home the doctrine via reflection or reading alone is not going to accomplish this for you, for instance: intellectually understanding that lifting weights will make you stronger will not make you stronger, it can, however inform your practice of exercise. Meditation, Vipassana, this is what helps me deal with what I perceive as extreme pain and discomfort. It helps me to learn to hold the pain without aversion, to see through it, to gradually learn to experience it as mere sensation, and then to move beyond it entirely. I highly recommend this if you have not begun. Please do not misunderstand me, doctrinal understanding is powerful and important, but for extreme pain and suffering, nothing beats the added benefit of properly executed Vipassana. If your pain keeps you from attending a retreat, consider contacting the Vipassana Meditation people, and requesting that they help you learn their technique. They are very awesome, in my own experience, and may be willing to work with you. Just a suggestion, intended to be a happy one.

When facing the dark decision of stepping out of this life to escape the pain, I have heard that this particular consideration is beneficial:

• the predicament of suffering that you face holds no intrinsic reality of its own, it is the empty, ungraspable expression of some sort of ultimately unknowable cause.
  
• It has as its creator, blind, habitual reactivity
  
• It has as its support, blind, habitual reactivity
  
• it has as its perpetuation, blind, habitual reactivity.
  
• To eliminate the suffering born of, supported by, and perpetuated by blind, habitual reactivity, non-attached awareness in a state of equanimity must be, and can be produced. There IS a way to do this.
  
  There are deep perspectives that also suggest that if you allow the pain to move you to exit stage left, that you are creating a future seed of suffering that will be inherited by the midstream that you identify with as being you, by committing an act of volitional intention in reaction to an aversion to sensation. In other words, there will be future karma produced that will perpetuate existence in samsara. No action is inherently right or wrong, but that is not to say that there are not inheritable consequences relative to our ultimate liberation and suffering with every intentional action. There is no exception to this mechanic.
  
  To work with this, we can "offer up" our pain, and learn to reduce suffering by developing equanimity and wisdom. Reflect in the ultimate non-permanence of the pain, and do Tonglen with your own suffering, give compassion and metta to yourself. Reflect on all others going through this and develop an intention to experience the pain and the suffernig directly, to know it as it is so that you can understand it, its cause, and its cessation, and use that as a seed of compassion for others going through this experience as well, "May I experience this so that no other beings have to experience the misery of this suffering." Use it as a seed of liberation. This is a very beneficial practice.
  
  You can also understand that if this suffering is the result of a perpetuated aggregation of ultimately empty causes which are defined by blind, habitual reactivity, then what you have is an opportunity to transcend this beginning-less cycle in the here and now by developing direct insight and transcendental wisdom coupled with genuine compassion, leading to perfect liberation. Utilize this moment of difficulty as a tool leading to ultimate liberation, reclaim this purpose of your life, and move this away from the weight of it as a reason to give up and run away. There can be purpose to your suffering, even if it is purposeless in and of itself, you can make that distinction.
  
  You can do this work, it will require practice, and will not happen overnight, which is why it is called practice. You will fill a bucket drop by drop by consistent practice. This is the sure and steady way to liberation. Always remember, the way out is though, not around, not avoiding, but through.
  
  Pema Chodron is an excellent teacher, I recommend her audio-book lessons on overcoming habitual re-activity, particularly, "Getting Unstuck" and her recent teachings, "The Truth of Our Existence."
  
  Additionally, you may want to look into Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programs, as they are based on Buddhist meditation techniques and have been clinically proven as effective tools working with "Stress" and increasing resilience. You can check out his Mindfulness for Pain program. If you are involved in a clinical rehabilitation program, consider asking them about MBSR, they may offer it, and if not, try to connect to a social worker through your clinical provider, hospital, or rehab center, depending on your situation, who may be able to help you out with a connection.
  
  Finally, just reading books on fundamental Buddhist principles like, "In the Buddha's Words" always help to increase my foundation of perspective in difficult and overwhelming times, or Shantideva's Guide To The Bodhisattva Way of Life (depending on your tradition preference).
  
  Any of the materials I listed can be found if you know how to look for them. I hope this has been, in some way, helpful, and not to long!
  
  Metta

> I know "The Way of the Bodhisattva" is a fundamental text of Mahayana Buddhism... should I start with that?

Absolutely!

> Any translations or commentaries you recommend?

I would suggest this one: by Vesna and Alan Wallace, Snow Lion Publications, 1997

> What are some good books for learning more about the path of the Bodhisattva?

The Path To Awakening

> In The Path to Awakening, Shamar Rinpoche gives his own detailed commentary on Chekawa Yeshe Dorje's Seven Points of Mind Training, a text that has been used for transformative practice in Tibetan Buddhism for close to a thousand years. Clear, accessible, and yet profound, this book is filled with practical wisdom, philosophy, and meditation instructions.

Shantideva.

A Guide to a Bodhisattva's Way of Life.

<br />
May I be a guard for all those who are protector-less,<br />
<br />
A guide for those who journey on the road,<br />
<br />
For those who wish to go across the water,<br />
<br />
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.<br />
<br />
For all those ailing in the world,<br />
<br />
Until their every sickness has been healed,<br />
<br />
May I myself become for them<br />
<br />
The doctor, nurse, the medicine itself.<br />
<br />
 ~ Shantideva 

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