The Way of the Bodhisattva by Śāntideva
Published 2003 · 25,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy
How hard is The Way of the Bodhisattva to read?
The Way of the Bodhisattva scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 44 out of 100
- The verse carries a formal, devotional register above everyday speech, and a cluster of untranslated Sanskrit terms — bodhicitta, paramita, klesha, samsara, nirvana — recur without the in-line glossing a conversational teacher like Suzuki gives them, leaning instead on a translator's footnotes or glossary. It sits well above Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind's plain spoken English but short of Moby-Dick's dense specialist jargon; closer to the elevated but still followable register of the Bhagavad Gita in translation.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Written as end-stopped quatrains, most verses land as single self-contained claims rather than nested subordinate clauses — but the compression of poetry forces a lot of argument into few words, and chapter 9's dialectical exchanges pack a claim, an objection, and a rebuttal into three or four lines. More demanding than Zen Mind's transcribed-talk flatness, well short of Jamesian or Proustian hypotaxis.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Chapter 9 mounts a sustained Madhyamaka argument that neither self nor phenomena possess inherent existence, refuting the Cittamatra ('mind-only') school's idealism through pure philosophical reasoning with none of the body-centered grounding Suzuki uses for comparably abstract claims. The ethical chapters stay more concrete — a splinter in a stranger's foot, a debt collector, a corpse — which keeps this below The Waste Land or Waiting for Godot, but chapter 9 alone pulls the average well past Zen Mind's 58.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- Unlike Suzuki's talks, which restate a handful of images across forty short chapters, each of the roughly nine hundred verses here advances a discrete point — a new argument against anger, a new analogy for self-cherishing, a new refutation of a rival school — with real cumulative build across ten chapters covering ethics, psychology of affliction, meditation, and epistemology. Denser than Lolita's flowing texture, short of War and Peace's historical apparatus.
How The Way of the Bodhisattva is regarded
The Way of the Bodhisattva holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.