The Profound Reality of Interdependence: An Overview of the Wisdom Chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva

The Way of the Bodhisattva, composed by the monk and scholar Śāntideva in eighth-century India, is a Buddhist treatise in verse that beautifully and succinctly lays out the theory and practice of the Mahayana path of a bodhisattva. Over one thousand years after Śāntideva's composition, Künzang Sönam (1823-1905) produced the most extensive commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva ever written. This book is the first English translation of Künzang Sönam's overview of Śāntideva's notoriously difficult chapter on wisdom.

The ninth chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva is philosophically very rich but forbiddingly technical, and can only be read well with a good commentary. Künzang Sönam's commentary offers a unique and complete introduction to the view of Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka, the summit of Buddhist philosophy in Tibet, as articulated by Tsongkhapa. It brings Śāntideva's text, and Tsongkhapa's interpretation of Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka, into conversation with a vast Buddhist literature from India and Tibet. By articulating the integral relationship between emptiness and interdependence, this text formulates a sustained and powerful argument for emptiness as a metaphysical basis of bodhisattva ethics. This volume makes the ninth chapter accessible to English-speaking teachers and students of the Way of the Bodhisattva.

Douglas Duckworth is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University. He is the author of Mipam on Buddha-Nature: The Ground of the Nyingma Tradition (2008) and Jamgön Mipam: His Life and Teachings (2011). He also introduced and translated Distinguishing the Views and Philosophies: Illuminating Emptiness in a Twentieth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Classic by Bötrül (2011). He is the author of Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature (OUP 2019).