Jay Garfield at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
A final idea that frames Harris’ interpretation of Śāntideva—one that is clearly correct, and unappreciated—is that the universal altruism and the attitudes of kindness, care, impartiality, and joy in the accomplishments of others that Śāntideva recommends do not constitute self-sacrifice or self-abnegation. Instead, Harris demonstrates that, on Śāntideva’s view, they are both constitutive of and instrumental to human happiness (40 ff., 60 ff.). So, when Śāntideva compares pleasure in the everyday world to honey on a razor blade, he is pointing out that the pursuit of our own pleasure in the end yields only pain, because of the attachment it generates to a fragile commodity; when Śāntideva argues that we only become happy when we dedicate ourselves to the welfare of others, the freedom from attachment to our own narrow interest expands our sources of joy. As Harris puts it, “Perfect giving, for Śāntideva, is private, but other-focused; self-benefitting, but radically benevolent; total, and yet not self-injurious” (67).
Harris thus frames Śāntideva’s text as a guide to escaping from the suffering of ordinary life by cultivating virtue, grounded in the insight that we succeed in advancing our own true interests only by detaching ourselves from apparent narrow self-interest and from a concern with the immediate present in favor of a longer and broader moral vision. This reading opens the text beautifully, and it helps the reader to unpack Śāntideva’s arguments.
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