The Bodhisattvacharyāvatāra, often rendered in English as “A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life,” is generally understood to have been composed in the early 8th century of the Common Era. More specifically, traditional and scholarly perspectives converge on a timeframe of approximately 700–750 CE for its composition. This situates the text within a mature phase of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, when the bodhisattva ideal had already become a fully developed spiritual path rather than a marginal current.

Within that historical horizon, Śāntideva is remembered as a monk associated with the great monastic university of Nālandā in India. The work is said to have been composed during his time there, emerging from a living context of rigorous study, debate, and contemplative practice. To reflect on this dating is to sense the text not as an isolated treatise, but as the crystallization of a vibrant intellectual and spiritual culture that was seeking to articulate, with precision and devotion, what it means to walk the bodhisattva path.