The bodhisattva is the central figure of Mahayana Buddhism, and the ideal is stated in terms that are deliberately extravagant: to attain full buddhahood, over three incalculable aeons, not for one’s own sake but in order to liberate every sentient being without exception — and to postpone one’s own final release until that is accomplished.

Taken literally the commitment is staggering and arguably impossible. Taken as an orientation it is the most demanding reframing of the Buddhist path anyone has proposed.

The word #

Bodhisattva combines bodhi, awakening, with sattva, being — “a being [oriented towards] awakening.” The Pali form is bodhisatta, and an alternative etymology reads the second element as sakta, “attached to” or “bent on,” which some scholars think is the earlier sense.

The term is not a Mahayana coinage. In early Buddhism it refers specifically to Gautama before his awakening, including through the previous lives narrated in the Jataka stories, where the bodhisatta perfects generosity, patience, and the rest across hundreds of births.

What the Mahayana does is universalise it. The bodhisattva career is not one exceptional being’s biography; it is the path all practitioners should take.

Three goals, one preferred #

The Mahayana distinguishes three possible attainments, and the distinction structures the whole tradition.

The arhat follows the teaching of a buddha, eliminates the defilements, attains nirvana, and is not reborn. This is the goal of the early schools and of Theravada.

The pratyekabuddha (“solitary buddha”) awakens without a teacher in an age when no teaching exists, and does not teach.

The samyaksambuddha (“fully and perfectly awakened buddha”) awakens without a teacher and establishes a teaching that endures for an age.

The Mahayana holds that the third is the goal every practitioner should aim at, and that the first two are provisional resting points — in the Lotus Sutra’s parable, a magic city conjured by a guide to let exhausted travellers rest before the real destination.

Two things should be said about the polemic. First, it is a polemic, and the early texts’ arhats are not the self-absorbed figures the caricature requires — they teach constantly and the canon is full of their compassion. Second, Theravada does recognise the bodhisatta path and reveres it; it simply does not require it, holding that it is the appropriate vocation for very few.

Bodhicitta #

The path begins with bodhicitta, “the mind of awakening”: the aspiration to attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.

The tradition distinguishes two stages. Aspirational bodhicitta is the wish, and Shantideva compares it to wanting to travel. Engaged bodhicitta is the actual undertaking of the training, which is setting out on the road.

Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara is the classic treatment and is hyperbolic about its value: the arising of bodhicitta is compared to a blind man finding a jewel in a rubbish heap, and to the flash of lightning that illuminates a whole landscape in a night of cloud. The reasoning is that a being with bodhicitta has converted every ordinary action into a cause of awakening.

Several methods exist for generating it.

The sevenfold cause and effect, from Atisha’s lineage: recognise all beings as having been one’s mother in some past life; recall their kindness; wish to repay it; develop love; develop compassion; develop the “superior intention” that takes personal responsibility for their welfare; and from that, bodhicitta.

Equalising and exchanging self and other, Shantideva’s method, is philosophically sharper. It argues that the division between my suffering and yours is not marked in reality: there is no aggregate self that suffers collectively, so the suffering in a body is not more mine in any defensible sense than suffering elsewhere is. The practice built on this is tonglen, taking in others’ suffering on the in-breath and giving out one’s own wellbeing on the out.

The vow #

Bodhicitta is formalised in a vow, taken ritually before a teacher or before an image, and renewed daily by many practitioners. The best-known formulation, the four great vows chanted in Zen:

Beings are numberless; I vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them. The buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to realise it.

The vows are impossible as stated, and this is not an oversight. The impossibility is the pedagogy: a vow that could be completed would produce a self congratulating itself on completion, and the point is a commitment without terminus. Zen commentary on these lines regularly makes exactly this observation.

Alongside the vow come the bodhisattva precepts, which differ from the monastic Vinaya in being available to laypeople and in emphasising positive obligation rather than restraint. In Japan, Saicho’s successful campaign to ordain using bodhisattva precepts alone had consequences for monastic discipline that are still visible; see Buddhism in Japan.

The ten grounds #

Progress is mapped across ten bhumis, each associated with one of the ten perfections and with specific attainments. The names give the flavour: Joyous, Stainless, Luminous, Radiant, Difficult to Master, Manifest, Gone Far, Immovable, Good Intelligence, Cloud of Dharma.

The first ground is reached when the practitioner directly realises emptiness — the point at which the path becomes irreversible. The eighth is a further threshold, where practice becomes effortless and the bodhisattva no longer regresses into ordinary appearance. After the tenth comes buddhahood.

The timescale is three incalculable aeons (asamkhyeya kalpa), a number the texts use to indicate a quantity beyond counting rather than a figure to be worked with. The Avatamsaka Sutra is the principal source for the scheme, and the Huayan school built on it.

The celestial bodhisattvas #

Mahayana devotion centres on a set of great bodhisattvas, understood as advanced beings who respond to those who call on them. Whether they are historical persons, cosmic principles, or aspects of one’s own mind is answered differently across the tradition, and often all three at once.

Avalokiteshvara — compassion. Guanyin in China, Kannon in Japan, Chenrezig in Tibet, of whom the Dalai Lamas are held to be emanations. The most widely venerated figure in Mahayana Buddhism.

Manjushri — wisdom. Depicted with a flaming sword that cuts through delusion and a text of the Prajnaparamita.

Samantabhadra — practice and vows, and the central figure of the Avatamsaka’s closing chapter.

Kshitigarbha (Jizo, Dizang) — who vowed not to become a buddha until the hells are emptied, and who protects children and travellers. In Japan the most visible devotional figure of all.

Tara — female, associated with swift compassionate action, and central in Tibetan practice. Her origin story has her vow to attain buddhahood in female form, refusing the suggestion that she pray to be reborn male.

Maitreya — the bodhisattva who will become the next buddha of this world, currently in the Tusita heaven.

Does the vow make sense? #

Two objections are worth taking seriously, and the tradition has answers.

If beings are numberless, the vow cannot be fulfilled, so buddhahood can never be attained. The standard reply distinguishes the vow’s orientation from a completion condition. Buddhahood is attained when the obscurations are removed, not when a quota is met; the vow directs the path rather than gating it.

If all beings are ultimately empty, who is being saved? The Diamond Sutra puts the paradox as sharply as possible: the bodhisattva should liberate all beings, and yet no being whatsoever is liberated; and if a bodhisattva entertains the notion of a being, that person is not a bodhisattva. The point is that liberation happens conventionally and that reifying the beings, the saving, or the saviour reintroduces exactly the grasping the path removes. See The Two Truths Doctrine.

A third objection is practical and comes from outside: that the ideal invites a kind of grandiosity, or licenses harm done for beings’ ultimate benefit. The tradition is aware of the second risk — the “compassionate killing” arguments in some tantric and East Asian sources are among its more uncomfortable material — and the bodhisattva precepts’ emphasis on actual benefit rather than stated intention is the usual check.

The ideal in practice #

Most practitioners do not encounter this as cosmology. What it amounts to day to day is narrower and harder:

Dedication of merit. Any wholesome act is concluded by dedicating its benefit to all beings, which prevents the accumulation of spiritual credit as a personal asset.

Reframing the reason for practice. A practitioner who sits in order to become calmer is doing something different from one who sits so as to become more useful, even if the posture is identical.

Treating difficulty as material. The perfection of patience takes hostile people as the necessary condition of its own development, which the Bodhicaryavatara presses to the conclusion that enemies are rarer and therefore more valuable than friends.

Common questions #

Do bodhisattvas really postpone nirvana? This is the popular formulation and it is not quite what the texts say. The bodhisattva declines the arhat’s nirvana in favour of full buddhahood, which is a higher attainment, not a deferral of release. “Postponement” suggests a sacrifice of the goal; the tradition presents it as choosing a greater one.

Can laypeople be bodhisattvas? Yes, and the bodhisattva vow is explicitly available to laypeople. Vimalakirti, the layman who out-argues the Buddha’s chief monastic disciples, is the tradition’s flagship case; see The Vimalakirti Sutra.

Is the bodhisattva ideal in the Pali canon? The bodhisatta path is, as the career of the being who became Gautama and of past buddhas. What is absent is the claim that everyone should take it.

Where should I start? Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara, which is readable, frequently funny, and the text Tibetan teachers most often recommend to beginners.

Sources & further reading #

Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Shambhala, rev. ed. 2006) — the indispensable text. Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism (Routledge, 2nd ed. 2009), chs. 8–10 — on the path and the celestial bodhisattvas. Pema Chödrön, No Time to Lose (Shambhala, 2005) — a contemporary commentary on Shantideva. Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (Kegan Paul, 1932) — dated but still the fullest survey of the sources. Thomas Cleary (trans.), The Flower Ornament Scripture (Shambhala, 1993) — the Avatamsaka, source of the ten grounds.