Cultivating Ethical Responsiveness: Śāntideva’s Bodhisattva Path and the Limits of Posthuman Relationality

This paper begins with a focused Buddhist-studies reading of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra and places its account of bodhisattva formation in dialogue with critical posthumanism through theories of figuration and Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology. Rather than treating the bodhisattva as an ethical supplement to the posthuman, it asks how a historically situated Mahāyāna textual tradition configures the formation of responsive agency. Close readings of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra focus on the distinction between aspirational and engaged bodhicitta, the path’s organization of ethical and contemplative cultivation, and its coordination of insight into emptiness with vow, compassion, the perfections, and skillful means (upāya). The analysis argues that responsiveness is not a spontaneous consequence of no-self or dependent origination: it is cultivated through practices that transform perception, disposition, and conduct. The selected feminist–materialist posthuman figurations of cyborg, monster, and compost, by contrast, map material, technological, ecological, and multispecies relations that condition action. Reading these repertoires diffractively brings them into reciprocal critical pressure without claiming doctrinal equivalence or historical continuity. Mahāyāna materials clarify the formative dimensions of ethical agency; posthumanism expands the field of conditions and beings to which such agency must answer. The comparison culminates in a provisional, explicitly contemporary normative reconstruction: non-appropriation, respect for affected beings’ agency, situated accountability, and openness to correction.