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 ...

Having surveyed how a buddha teacher and an arhat teacher expound the dharma, Khenpo Kunpal goes on to address the manner of exposition of a learned paṇḍita teacher. In traditional Buddhist India, paṇḍitas were the product of the great classical institutions of Buddhist learning, the two most renowned being the Buddhist universities of Nālandā and Vikramaśīla.

The tradition of the Early Translation School [snga ’gyur snying ma pa] traces itself back to the university of Nālandā, which produced such illustrious scholars as the incomparable Nāgārjuna [klu sgrub]. Among the masters who brought Buddhism to Tibet, many of them, such as Śāntarakṣita [zhi ba ’tsho] and Guru Rinpoche, were paṇḍitas who had graduated from Nālandā.

Paṇḍitas from Nālandā had a particular style of explication of the direct and authentic words of the Buddha [sangs rgyas kyi bka’ thad ka], which was known as the five-fold excellence [phun sum tshogs pa lnga]. Furthermore, they possessed a unique method of analysis that they applied to the treatises [bstan bcos, skr. śāstra] written about the Buddha’s teachings, which was known as the ‘five types of preliminary assessment’ [rtsis ’go yan lag lnga].

The first of these, the five-fold excellence [phun sum tshogs pa lnga], refers to the following:

  1. the excellent teaching [chos phun sum tshogs pa],
  2. the excellent teacher [ston pa phun sum tshogs pa],
  3. the excellent place [gnas phun sum tshogs pa],
  4. the excellent entourage [’khor phun sum tshogs pa], and
  5. the excellent time [dus phun sum tshogs pa].

Teaching the dharma according to these five excellences ensures the teaching’s authenticity.

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