Introduction to Buddhism in the United States

Link to the web site for the 2025 version of the course

Some background

This course, “Introduction to Buddhism in the United States”, herein I2BUS, was originally developed and offered in a COVID-induced Zoom format under the auspices of the Insight Meditation Community of Charlottesville in the fall of 2021. Prior to this, The Center at Belvedere had long expressed interest in such a course and with COVID waning I decided to try it in a more secular format in-person. The 50-person classroom filled to capacity and maybe half of these people stuck through the whole thing: the web page and resources for this can be found here.

The course somewhat unexpectedly spun off a twice-monthly discussion group at the Center titled, with due respect to William James, “Varieties of Spiritual Experience”, which took a much broader approach, developed under the able leadership of Gary Moody, and ran for about two years before further mutating. While participating in VSE, I kept getting requests to present the Buddhism course again and, did so once again in 2025 in a somewhat shortened version, leaving out a couple of weeks of detailed discussions of Buddhist texts.

In the spring of 2025, in the process of experimenting with a possible interactive web site for VSE (didn’t work out…) I started experimenting with recording and posting the I2BUS talks, including some of the material left out of the 2025 version, and including some additional new talks. In the absence of [the discipline of…] the time constraints of the in-person format, some of these talk are more extended as well.

The objective of the course is to present information about various Buddhist traditions and approaches, not to “convert” people to Buddhism (which unlike in some religious traditions, isn’t really a thing in Buddhism anyway). However, as I’ve spent considerable time giving talks from an explicitly Buddhist perspective to people with a commitment to the approach, and yes, I believe most of this stuff, I’ll probably occasionally veer across that broad grey area into something that sounds more like advocacy. Though VSE has evolved some nice norms on presenting sincerely held positions without expecting others to adopt them.

As this course should also make clear, Buddhism has an extraordinarily complex history and teachings, and is undergoing multiple dynamic adaptations to modern conditions in both Asia and the West, so in the process of condensing 2500 years into about [what started out as…] 240 minutes, some nuance will be lost: my apologies on all counts.