Study the Dharma the way you'd take a course.
Not a library to browse, but a path to walk — guided courses that take you through the Buddha's teachings one text at a time, with a teacher, reading notes, real questions, and assignments. The way you'd learn anything worth learning.
How a course works
Every session follows the same rhythm — the structure that makes it a course, and not just more reading.
One path, step by step
Twenty-one courses. Ten of them form one path in six steps, each built on the texts the step before taught you to read; the other eleven sit alongside it, to take in any order.
The path
6 steps · 10 courses一條路 — take the steps in order. Each step reads texts that the step before taught you how to read.
The way in 入門
For someone who has never encountered Buddhism at all. Stories first, then the people who stood around the Buddha while he told them — with a daily sitting practice to begin alongside. No doctrine and no technical terms.
Stories the Buddha Told
Ten stories, ten questions, and nothing you need to look up.
Ten Who Knew Him
Ten people, each the best in the world at exactly one thing.
Meditation, Step by Step
From a single ten-minute sit to a sustained daily practice.
Read whole scriptures 讀一部經
The core of the Academy. Eight short scriptures, each read from the first line to the last — finish it and you will have read eight complete Buddhist scriptures, not eight summaries of them.
Two traditions, one question 南北對讀
Six questions anyone asks eventually, each answered twice — once from the Visuddhimagga, once from the Chinese treatises — side by side, so you can watch two schools work on the same problem.
The signature course 善財參學
Sudhana walks south and studies under fifty-three teachers in turn — a road story about the plainest and most demanding idea in the tradition: that you can learn from anyone.
The schools, in depth 學派深入
Three hard electives, best read against each other: Yogācāra as a psychology, Madhyamaka as the dismantling of every position, and the Perfection of Wisdom at full length. A fourth, on the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, waits until that translation is finished.
The Eight Consciousnesses
Yogācāra as a psychology, read straight through.
Nothing Stands
Madhyamaka, and the dismantling of every position.
The Diamond Sūtra, All Thirty-Two
The Perfection of Wisdom, at full length.
Read it in Chinese 讀原文
The last step turns around: having learned the Dharma in English, you learn to read the same texts in Chinese. We counted the canon — 576 characters cover ninety percent of every sūtra in it.
Take any of these whenever you like. None is required by the path, and none requires it.
One theme, several texts
7 short courses主題短課 — four to seven sessions each, built around a single question and read across several discourses. Take them in any order; none requires another.
The Wheel Set Rolling
The four noble truths from four angles — first announced to a skeptical audience, then given their full technical definition, then shown as a deliberate restriction: a handful of leaves against the whole forest.
No Core Is Found Here
Impermanence, suffering, and not-self read four ways — and closing honestly rather than triumphantly, on the lived gap between understanding an argument and actually being settled by it.
The Three Fires
Greed, hatred, and delusion read as a mechanism rather than a list of sins — the attention that lets them arise, and the shortest definition of their ending in the whole Pali Canon.
The Owner of Your Deeds
Kamma as causal fit, not fate or a cosmic ledger — with the pattern's own honest limits, and the one deed that ends the whole mechanism.
Boundless in Every Direction
Two brahmins argue over whose teacher taught the true path to Brahmā; the answer replaces an unverifiable ritual claim with four states anyone can cultivate and check.
At the Bedside
Preparing for your own death, consoling the grieving, counseling the dying in severe pain, and a family present at a death that went well. Named people, not a general philosophy of impermanence.
Teaching Like the Buddha
Seven suttas read not for their doctrine but for his method — giving a village a test instead of a belief, refusing a question on principle, reaching a murderer with a single word.
Debate & logic
2 courses因明 — the Tibetan monastic training in reasoning, adapted for English speakers. Take these two in order; the second assumes the first.
Collected Topics
Six centuries before a Tibetan monk studies the mind or emptiness, they first learn to catch bad reasoning in front of their peers — starting with the safest possible subject, colors and shapes.
Reading the Pramāṇavārttika
Collected Topics teaches the grammar of debate. This points that grammar at the question everything else depends on — why trust this teacher at all?
More whole texts
2 courses通讀 — two longer readings beside the path: the earliest discourses in learning order, and the Mahāyāna's own scriptures, starting with the Heart Sūtra.
Ru-Yi Academy is being built now, ahead of its full opening. These first courses are taught in small tutorials so the material can be tested and refined with real students before the Academy opens its doors. The texts themselves do not wait for the courses — the whole sūtra collection and Theravāda library are already open, in full. Interested in taking a course? Get in touch through Community.