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Chapter 9 A Buddhist ‘good life’ Theory: Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra Linda E. Patrik & Scholars in diaspora carry their texts with them—as many texts as possible— to preserve their cultural and intellectual tradition when they are threatened by political forces and military invasions. The Tibetan scholars who fled Tibet in 1959 managed to bring out a large number of classic texts central to the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy and religion of pre-invasion Tibet. Among these texts was an old Indian Buddhist work on ethics, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra (Guide to the Bodhisattva Path), which had itself been carried out of India centuries earlier during the time when Buddhism disappeared from its Indian birthplace. For over a thousand years, Tibetan philosophers wrote commentaries on this text, taught the text in Tibetan shedras (monastic universities) and aspired to live by its ethical guidelines. Protected from the suppressions of Buddhism in the countries where it had originally been studied, Śāntideva’s ethical theory of the altruistic principles of a bodhisattva’s training has, now, been introduced to Western philosophers by Tibetan philosophers in exile. As sympathetic as Western scholars have been to the political plight of Tibet, they have little knowledge of its philosophical traditions. Several obstacles lie in front of the welcome mat for Tibetan diasporic texts. First, there is a shortage of translators, especially those trained in philosophy. Tibet had been cut off from the rest of the world prior to the Chinese invasion of 1950, and there were no sizeable, established Tibetan ethnic communities in other countries. Also, in Tibet today, very few ethnic Tibetan children attend schools where they are taught Tibetan grammar and the advanced linguistic skills necessary for understanding the classic texts of the Tibetan canon; instead, most Tibetan children are taught Chinese language and are taught all of their other academic subjects in the Chinese language as well. Without translators, the work of transmitting Tibetan classical texts through 190 Patrik other languages will be slow, and yet this work is necessary not only for preserving these texts but for introducing them to international scholars. A second obstacle is that the Tibetan government in exile does not have the financial resources to support scholars with fellowships and travel grants, making it difficult for Tibetan scholars to study in the West and for Western scholars to do research with the Tibetan scholars in exile in India. Private donations fund virtually all intellectual exchanges between Western and Tibetan scholars, as well as the Tibetan libraries, institutes and monasteries outside of Tibet. Compared to the vast financial resources of China’s growing economy, the resources that support research into the Tibetan tradition are paltry. The migration of Tibet’s classic texts has always been on the budget plan. The most significant obstacle, however, is the conceptual disparity between Western philosophy and the Tibetan philosophical and religious tradition. Western scholars who are familiar with the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka and southeast Asia, the Hinduism and Jainism of India or the Mahayana Buddhism of Japan, Korea and pre-communist China, find that the Tibetan tradition has preserved a substantial body of philosophical theories and Tantric liturgies that are so distinctive that one struggles to compare these with the Buddhism in these other traditions. One of these points of difference is the strong altruism of Tibetan ethical theories. Neither Theravada Buddhism nor Zen Buddhism emphasizes as much as Tibetan theories the altruistic bodhisattva path and the need to develop compassion , along with realization of emptiness. The conceptual disparity between Western theories of altruism and Tibetan theories of altruism is even starker, since it is not simply a matter of lesser or greater emphasis on compassion but a matter of understanding whether the selflessness of altruism involves self-sacrifice or non-existence of a self. Generally, Western theories of altruism are not based on a metaphysical claim that the self does not exist but instead analyze how a self can subordinate self-interest to the interests of others. Buddhist theories of altruism , particularly in the Tibetan tradition, are anchored in the path of realizing that there is no self. This conceptual disparity regarding altruism is age-old. Over two thousand years ago, Greek philosophers and Indian Buddhist philosophers inquired into the ways that people live their lives in the search for happiness. Both sets of ancient theories shared a this-worldly approach: they viewed the human good life as a product of humans’ own actions and as a deliberate undertaking...

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