The six paramitas, dana, sila, kshanti, virya, dhyana and prajna, describe the path a bodhisattva cultivates across countless lifetimes toward full Buddhahood, and Mahayana literature places dana first for a practical reason: it requires no prior attainment. Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara, the eighth century guide to the bodhisattva way of life structured chapter by chapter around cultivating exactly this path, opens its treatment of giving by redefining the perfection itself, arguing that dana paramita is completed not by the elimination of poverty in the world, an impossible goal, but by the elimination of miserliness in the giver's own mind, so that the perfection is a change of disposition rather than a quantity of goods transferred. Mahayana commentarial literature typically divides the practice into three kinds: the giving of material things, the giving of fearlessness, protecting beings from danger or anxiety, and the giving of dharma, sharing the teaching itself, which later texts often rank highest because it addresses suffering at its root rather than only its symptoms.
The Theravada tradition keeps a parallel but larger list, the ten perfections, paramis, in which dana likewise stands first; the two schemes are usually read as related enumerations of the same aspiration rather than one derived mechanically from the other, a six fold Mahayana condensation alongside a ten fold Theravada elaboration.