 As Barbra Clayton has shown, the description of the bodhisattva’s way of life in the ŚS features an interesting perspective on the role of puṇya, “goodness” or “good karma”. Early Buddhist texts appear to take the view that the Saint (Sanskrit arhat) stops creating karmic traces, whether good or bad, as a result of her experience of liberation. These karmic traces function to project happy or unhappy future experiences in cyclic existence; and a Saint, who is free of cyclic existence, must therefore have left goodness behind, along with the vile actions that lead to misery. Śāntideva, on the other hand, sees even quite advanced bodhisattvas as committed to the ongoing cultivation of goodness, not for their own sake, but in order to transfer it to other sentient beings and thereby sustain their progress towards spiritual maturity (see Clayton 2006: 76–88). 