The Bodhisattva Path

Learn about the bodhisattva ideal--the capacity to see the potential for awakening in everyone and aspire to help them along their path--with new commentaries on early Mahayana sutras from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk Time magazine calls "the father of mindfulness."

Based on a three-month retreat given by Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh in the winter of 1991, this book gives an historical account of the emergence of the bodhisattva ideal during the first century CE, together with Thich Nhat Hanh's previously unpublished commentaries on two early Mahayana sutras--the Ugraparipṛccha Sutra (The Questions of the Householder Ugra) and the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sutra (The Instructions of Vimalakīrti).

About 150 years after the death of the historical Buddha, Buddhism had begun to develop into many separate schools, in which many monks came to prioritize their own personal liberation in their teaching and practice, while making Buddhism into a series of doctrines that served their own school. They came to live in a way that was cut off from other schools and from laypeople and saw laypeople as there primarily to make offerings and support the monks, not as practitioners who could also benefit fully from the Buddha's teachings.

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh

Publisher: Palm Leaves Press

Released Date: 2022

ISBN: 9781952692338