Nalanda's laziest monk may have stated utilitarianism a thousand years early
Legend says the monks of Nalanda mocked Shantideva as an idler and set him up to humiliate himself before the whole university. Instead he recited a long poem on the bodhisattva path that Buddhists still study, including a call to end the suffering of all beings that one scholar dates about a millennium before Bentham.
Shantideva was an 8th-century Indian monk, poet and scholar at the great monastic university of Nalanda, and a follower of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna. His life comes to us through Tibetan historians such as Buton and Taranatha, plus a short Sanskrit biography found in a 14th-century Nepalese manuscript. The accounts disagree. One makes him a prince named Santivarman from Saurastra, in today's Gujarat; the earliest surviving biography, by Vibhuticandra, places his birth in the southern city of Sringara and says his mother urged him to run away before he became a king.
At Nalanda he earned the nickname Bhusuku and a reputation for skipping study and practice; fellow monks joked that his only accomplishments were bodily ones like eating and sleeping. According to the story, they had him mount a lion throne to address everyone, expecting him to fail. He recited with ease, and the bodhisattva Manjushri is said to have appeared and vanished with him. Searching his room, the monks found finished manuscripts.
Two works survive. The Sikshasamuccaya, or Training Anthology, runs to 19 chapters built around 27 short memory verses and consists largely of quotations from Mahayana sutras. The Bodhicaryavatara, rendered in English as a guide to the bodhisattva's way of life, is a long poem tracing the road from the first spark of awakening to full buddhahood. The 14th Dalai Lama published commentaries on it in 1994, 1997 and 2004.
Shantideva argued that belief in a fixed personal self is baseless and harmful. If the self is no more real than a queue or an army is a single thing, he asked, why should one's own happiness count above anyone else's? He treated generosity as an inner renunciation of body, possessions and merit rather than simple giving away, and saw it as a form of liberation that benefits both the giver and others.
Source: Shantideva
