© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2023, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX Religions of South Asia 17.1 (2023) 111–113 ISSN (print) 1751-2689 https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.25462 ISSN (online) 1751-2697 Review Readings of Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice, edited by Jonathan C. Gold and Douglas S. Duckworth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. xiv + 302 pp., £70 (hb), £25 (pb). ISBN 9780231192668 (hb), 9780231192675 (pb). Reviewed by: D. E. Osto, Massey University, New Zealand. D.Osto@massey.ac.nz Keywords: Bodhicaryāvatāra; literary criticism; Mahāyāna Buddhism; Śāntideva. This edited volume contains the essays of fifteen Buddhist Studies scholars writing on the highly influential and venerated Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist text known in Sanskrit as the Bodhicaryāvatāra, or in English as the Guide to Bodhisattva Practice, composed in North India by the monk Śāntideva in the eighth century. Written in verse, the Guide is both a highly poetic and a philo- sophical work concerned with the practice to attain Buddhahood, the highest aspiration of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Together with Śāntideva’s other major work, the Śikṣāsamuccaya, or Training Anthology, the Guide summarizes and condenses the vast Mahāyāna path outlined in various ways within hundreds of scriptures, commentaries, and philosophical tracts. Venerated through- out the Buddhist world but especially within the Indo-Tibetan tradition, the Guide was translated, commented upon, quoted, and ritually deployed for centuries. As a ‘world classic’ (see Jonathan Gold’s contribution, pp. 11–18), the Guide continues to be read and interpreted to this day. The first two chapters of the edited volume introduce us to the Guide and its wider textual context. In the ‘Introduction’, Jonathan Gold (pp. 1–25) dis- cusses overarching themes found in the Guide such as karmic merit, ‘the mind of enlightenment’ (bodhicitta), and the interwoven elements of prayer, medi- tation and philosophy. Here Gold borrows from Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900– 2002) the idea that a ‘classic’ is an ancient text that ‘speaks to the present as though it belongs to our world’ (pp. 12–13). In this way, the Guide has entered our time as a ‘work that modern readers can use as a moral model’ (p. 13), but, Gold warns, we should not imagine that the uses to which we now put the text are necessarily anything other than modern interpretations (p. 13). In Chapter 1, Paul Harrison compares the structure of Śāntideva’s Guide to that of his Training Anthology to discern the relation between the two and the author’s intended project. Citing over one hundred scriptural sources, the