Bodhisattvacharyavatara

by Andreas Kretschmar | 246,740 words

The English translation of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara (“entering the conduct of the bodhisattvas”), a Sanskrit text with Tibetan commentary. This book explains the bodhisattva concept and gives guidance to the Buddhist practitioner following the Mahāyāna path towards the attainment of enlightenment. The text was written in Sanskrit by Shantideva ...

The famous example or metaphor [dpe] of the unlikeliness of attaining a human rebirth is that of a blind turtle dwelling at the bottom of the ocean and swimming up to the surface only once every hundred years. The likelihood of this turtle ever accidentally sticking its neck through a single yoke floating on the vast ocean’s surface is very slim.

Concerning this example of the turtle [rus sbal gyi dpe], understand the ocean to be a metaphor for the endless suffering of the three lower realms, which are as vast and deep as the ocean. The blind turtle is a metaphor for the beings of the three lower realms who lack the vision [mig] to distinguish between what must be accepted and rejected.

Also, while the turtle’s rising to the ocean’s surface only once every 100 years is very rare, liberation is even rarer than this. Just as the hole in the yoke is very small, so is the chance to achieve rebirth in the body of a god or a human being. That the yoke is tossed hither and thither by the wind is analogous to our karmic dependency [gzhan dbang can] on virtuous and negative deeds.

Reflect on the difficulty of attaining a human body through this example as well as through numerical comparisons. If you compare the number of insects in the world to the number of human beings, you realize how many more beings are reborn as insects than as humans. Furthermore, the number of beings living in the ocean far exceeds the number of humans. Among all human beings in the world, moreover, only a few follow the dharma [chos pa], and among those who do follow the Buddhist teachings, only a small number are actually practitioners [nyams len bso mkhan].

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