The following is an excerpt from The Great Hūṃ: A Commentary on Śāntideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva translated by Douglas Duckworth.
Translator’s Introduction
The Buddhist textual universe is vast, and it is helpful to have anthologies and short poetic summaries to get oriented in this world. Śāntideva (ca. eighth century) has provided both. Śāntideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryāvatāra) is a masterwork of philosophical poetry, and his compilation of Buddhist literature in the Anthology of Training (Śikṣāsamuccaya) provides both a representative sampling of Buddhist scriptures and a structure through which to interpret this vast literary corpus. By pulling together a wide range of topics on the practice of the Buddhist path in the anthology, Śāntideva shaped a systematic presentation of the bodhisattva path from an incredible array of texts. In his shorter Way of the Bodhisattva, he poetically rendered a concise Buddhist treatise in verses that beautifully and succinctly lay out the theory and practice of the Mahāyāna path of a bodhisattva.
Over one thousand years after Śāntideva’s composition, Minyak Kunzang Sönam (1823–1905), a student of the celebrated Paltrul Rinpoché (1808– 87), composed in eastern Tibet the most extensive commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva ever written, Excellent Vase That Spills Forth an Ocean of the Inexhaustible and Precious Qualities of the Victor’s Children: An Explanation of the Way of the Bodhisattva (Byang chub sems pa’i spyod pa la ’jug pa’i ’grel bshad rgyal sras rgya mtsho’i yon tan rin po che mi zad ’jo ba’i bum bzang). Paltrul Rinpoché is said to have requested him to write a commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva in accordance with the interpretation of the “new schools” (gsar phyogs).1 He did so in nearly a thousand pages. A noteworthy feature of his commentary is the way it shows how the Way of the Bodhisattva explicitly relates to the Anthology of Training, which itself embeds hundreds of texts. That is to say, the commentary shows how the Way of the Bodhisattva brings together a wide range of texts and ideas from a vast and profound Buddhist literature.
Śāntideva’s verses stand alone, yet the commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva by Minyak Kunzang Sönam shines a light into their depth and further illustrates how both of Śāntideva’s texts are woven together and form an integrated whole. Minyak Kunzang Sönam cites the Anthology of Training nearly three hundred times in his commentary. He additionally draws from several other sources, and many sūtras and treatises. In this, he follows Śāntideva’s lead in providing both an entry point and a panoramic view of Buddhist theory and practice as a living and historical tradition. The text is encyclopedic and offers a rich presentation of the bodhisattva path. As a backdrop to the terse verses of the Way of the Bodhisattva, it draws upon a vast literature in citations to weave together Mahāyāna classics like Asaṅga’s Bodhisattva Grounds (Bodhisattvabhūmi) and Compendium of Abhidharma (Abhi dharma samuccaya) with Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī), Maitreya’s Ornament of the Mahāyāna Sūtras (Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra), and Āryaśūra’s Garland of Birth Stories (Jātakamālā), among many others. Significantly, Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary integrates passages from Śānti deva’s Anthology of Training into his commentary on the verses of the Way of the Bodhisattva, showing how these two texts complement each other, in addition to citing passages from over a hundred different sūtras and a hundred different treatises from the Tibetan canon, the largest canon of Buddhist texts from India in the world.
"Śāntideva shaped a systematic presentation of the bodhisattva path from an incredible array of texts."
Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary references all major sections of the Buddhist canon (Sūtra, Vinaya, and Abhidharma) and also integrates all “the six scriptures of the Kadampa.” The six scriptures, which display a range of Buddhist genres that form a comprehensive curricular structure, are the Collection of Aphorisms (Udānavarga), the Garland of Birth Stories, the Bodhisattva Grounds, the Ornament of the Mahāyāna Sūtras, the Anthology of Training, and the Way of the Bodhisattva. Minyak Kunzang Sönam additionally cites passages from Āryaśūra’s Condensed Perfections (Pāramitāsamāsa), a poetic text that also presents the six perfections, and does so in a way that seamlessly aligns with the chapters of the Way of the Bodhisattva.
There are many Indian commentaries on the Way of the Bodhisattva translated into Tibetan, and Minyak Kunzang Sönam cites many of them in his commentary as well, including those by Praj.ākaramati, Kalyāṇadeva, Vibhūticandra, Kṛṣṇapa, and Vairocanarakṣita. Only one of these Indian commentaries, however, has survived in Sanskrit: the eleventh- century commentary by Praj.ākaramati that Minyak Kunzang Sönam refers to as “the great commentary.” There are several Tibetan commentaries on the Way of the Bodhisattva as well, including important commentaries composed between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Minyak Kunzang Sönam draws in particular from those of Gyalsé Tokmé (1295–1369), Sazang Mati Paṇchen (1294–1376), Butön Rinchen Drup (1290–1364), and Gyaltsab Jé (1364–1432).
Another Tibetan commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva, composed by another of Paltrul Rinpoché’s students, Khenpo Kunpel (1870/72– 1943), has been translated into English as The Nectar of Manjushri’s Speech. Khenpo Kunpel was also a student of Mipam Rinpoché (1846–1912), who himself was a student of Paltrul Rinpoché and received teachings from him on the Way of the Bodhisattva. While both Minyak Kunzang Sönam and Khenpo Kunpel transmit Paltrul Rinpoché’s oral instructions on the text, Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary is more intertextual than Khenpo Kunpel’s work in that he interweaves into his commentary many more different texts that undergird Śāntideva’s verses.
There are several English translations of the Way of the Bodhisattva, as well as many commentaries, so we might wonder: why this one? This is my answer: Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary draws upon a staggering range of texts that display the immense depth and breadth of the ocean of Buddhist literature, an ocean that Śāntideva represented in eighth- century India and that Minyak Kunzang Sönam navigated in nineteenth- century Tibet. Now that so many sūtras from the Buddhist canon are becoming available in English, the time is right to appreciate these texts not only as discrete compositions, but as part of a larger system and interpretative structure. This text and commentary offer such a structure.
"Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary draws upon a staggering range of texts that display the immense depth and breadth of the ocean of Buddhist literature."
The Way of the Bodhisattva is important as a text that integrates theory and practice. It is commonly studied first at monastic colleges and plays a role in the systematic transmission of contemplative practice. It is a kind of “wisdom literature,” filled with short, practical directives that shape a contemplative life. Paltrul Rinpoché also had a unique relationship to this text. He is considered by his students to be the “Tibetan Śāntideva,” and he said that there was no text like the Way of the Bodhisattva in India or Tibet that essentializes the practical instructions on the six perfections and is easy to understand. Paltrul Rinpoché is said to have taught this text in a special way as a practical instruction, which was transmitted to his students, including Minyak Kunzang Sönam. For these reasons, I think it is useful to have another commentary available in English, and this one in particular.
Kunzang Sönam’s work is technically an interlinear commentary (mchan ’grel), so all of the words of Śāntideva’s root verses appear in order in the commentary. Yet rather than mechanically preserving this aspect of the text, I have chosen to focus more on the fluidity of the meaning instead of this formal aspect of his commentary. Nevertheless, when Kunzang Sönam directly glosses a term or phrase from the verses, I have rendered the words in the commentary in bold.
Typical of the genre of commentarial literature, Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary embeds Indian and Tibetan commentaries on other texts, which have in turn embedded others. For instance, in addition to texts and commentaries on the Way of the Bodhisattva, sections of Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s commentary draw upon Tsongkhapa’s commentary on the “Discipline” chapter of the Bodhisattva Grounds, and elsewhere he draws directly from the works of Paltrul Rinpoché, such as his work on the stages of meditation in the Way of the Bodhisattva, within which Paltrul Rinpoché, in turn, draws from Sakya Paṇḍita’s (1182–1251) Clarifying the Sage’s Intent (Thub pa’i dgongs gsal).
The commentary is full of other texts embedded in this way—it is a rich tapestry embroidered from the golden threads of the Buddha’s teaching. Minyak Kunzang Sönam’s overview at the beginning of chapter 4, for instance, draws from the “Discipline” chapter from Asaṅga’s Bodhisattva Grounds, Candragomin’s Twenty Verses on the Bodhisattva Vow (Bodhisattvasaṃvara viṃśaka), which summarizes that chapter, as well as Tsongkhapa’s Highway to Awakening (Byang chub gzhung lam), which is a commentary on that chapter. Additionally, Minyak Kunzang Sönam draws from the Ākāśagarbha Sūtra in contrast to Asaṅga’s presentation in the Bodhisattva Grounds and shows how these two presentations of the bodhisattva trainings are integrated in Śāntideva’s Anthology of Training. He thus presents an erudite and beautiful commentary on a short and inspirational text.
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Śāntideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryāvatāra) is without a doubt one of the greatest masterpieces of Indian Buddhism and the single most influential text on Mahāyāna ethical theory. Its longest commentary in any language is the one translated here, by the nineteenth-century master Minyak Kunzang Sönam. It came to be known as the Great Hūṃ because it fills the entirety of the third or hūṃ volume of the author’s collected works.
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