Study the Dharma the way you'd take a course.

For someone who has never encountered Buddhism at all and is not sure they want to. No doctrine, no technical terms, nothing to believe — one story and one question a week. A husband and wife who bet each other not to speak. A mother who weeps for the wrong son. A man who spends everything he has to buy a turtle.

English-language Buddhism talks about the Buddha as though he were alone. He was not. Ten disciples, each foremost at one thing — wisdom, spiritual power, austerity, emptiness, preaching, memory — read three times over: his life, his own first-person account of how he got in, and the day a layman named Vimalakīrti told him his speciality was where he had stopped. Ends at the First Council, where three of them produced everything else on this site.

Ask someone who has read widely about Buddhism how many sūtras they have read from the first line to the last, and the honest answer is usually none. Eight short texts, each complete, each read whole — with three passages opened closely, one practice, and one question left open. No background of any kind is assumed.

Most people read a good meditation guide, sit once, and never sit again — not from bad instructions, but because nobody taught them what to do about the tenth day. This course is built entirely around that gap: building the habit first, then working through the stages of calm and insight, one week of real practice at a time.

A boy is told to go south and find a teacher. Each teacher he finds teaches him one thing, insists it is the only thing they know, and sends him on to somebody else — fifty-three times. Thirteen sessions follow a route through them: a physician, a girl, an incense-seller, a sea-captain, a king who only appears to be cruel, a teacher from another religion, and at the end a tower large enough to hold the cosmos.

Most introductions to Buddhism hand you doctrines to memorize. This one has you read what the Buddha actually said. Over twelve sessions we walk through twelve carefully chosen discourses — arranged in learning order, from the most concrete and useful toward the more subtle — the way a college seminar reads a primary source.

Reads the Mahāyāna's own scriptures the way The Buddha's Own Words reads the earliest suttas — starting with the shortest, most essential text in the whole canon. Session 1 uses the negation lesson from Collected Topics to get past the two classic misreadings of the Heart Sūtra: nihilism, and mere word-games; Sessions 2–3 work through the Diamond Sūtra's questions to Subhūti, and Session 4 asks what a bodhisattva actually is.

To read a Chinese newspaper you need roughly three thousand characters. Scripture is not a newspaper: we counted all 1,482 sutras in the Taishō canon, and 576 characters cover ninety percent of them. Four sessions build on that — the formula that opens four in every ten sutras, the speech verbs that tell you who is addressing whom, the difference between 無, 不 and 非, and finally the Heart Sūtra entire, all 260 characters, nothing summarized. Assumes no Chinese at all, and never asks you to write or speak a word of it.

Six questions that bring people to Buddhism, each answered in full from both great streams of the tradition — the Visuddhimagga on one side, the Chinese treatises on the other, both in Ru-Yi's own translations from Pāli and Chinese. You read each answer whole, in the text's own words, before anyone compares them. Nothing is adjudicated.

The most detailed account of how experience is assembled that anyone produced before the twentieth century, read straight through the Cheng Weishi Lun — from the full argument against a self, through seeds and perfuming and the fourfold division inside every act of knowing, to the consciousness that quietly takes the storehouse to be a self, and finally to the turning at the base where the organ of self-division becomes the organ of compassion.

Nāgārjuna is not defending a position; he is taking apart every position anyone has held, including his own school's. Eight sessions through the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā — the four corners of arising, the walker who cannot be found, fire and fuel, the moral objection and the inversion that answers it, and the chapter where emptiness is accused of destroying Buddhism. Ends with the school's own account of its method, and the line it has been travelling toward: once the sickness of existence dissolves, the medicine of emptiness is set aside too.

Four sections a session, first line to last, following Grand Master Taixu's 1927 lecture notes the whole way. Where the beginners' course reads this sūtra once as a complete scripture, this one reads it as an argument — the is-not, therefore is called formula that appears more than twenty times and that most readers stop halfway through, the four notions, the raft that must not be carried, and a mind that arises fully and comes to rest nowhere.