Commentarial writing is at the heart of most Buddhist traditions of study. The ś

Commentarial writing is at the heart of most Buddhist traditions of study. The śāstra tradition developed Buddhist philosophical systems through detailed commentary on sūtra and abhidharma texts. To this day, line-by-line explanations of Buddhist texts remains one of the most common forms of Buddhist teaching.
In this paper, you will just select a particular section of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra to explain in the form of a commentary. Your commentary should help to explain the meaning of the stanzas that you select both 1) in relation to an aspect of foundational Buddhist teachings that we have studied so far and 2) through examples and images drawn from your own experience as a college student in 2024. The commentary should be approximately 750 words long (at least 500 words and no more than 1000)
(I’ve provided all the readings for you so you can get a sense of what I am learning, this will be crucial for later on in the essay. Remember you are only choosing a section of text, do not analyze each chapter, in fact, just a section in a chapter. The in-class notes I’ve taken pictures of are also key to explaining the chapters, helping analyze the section you choose. )