Six Questions
There are about six questions that bring people to Buddhism, and they are not the ones on the syllabus. Who am I. What is this mind doing. Why does it hurt. What happens when I die. What counts as living well. Is any of it for anything.
Every Buddhist tradition answers all six. They do not give the same answers — and in English, you will almost never be shown that. Books tend to pick a lane: a Theravāda book, a Zen book, a Tibetan book, each answering from inside one house, often without mentioning that the house next door came to a different conclusion from the same starting material.
This course puts the two great streams of the tradition on the same page, question by question. You read the Southern answer in full, from the text itself, until it is genuinely satisfying. Then you read the Northern answer in full, from the text itself. Then we look at where the road actually forked — and nobody is corrected.
Two traditions, working on the same question, in their own words. Neither of them adjusted to make the comparison tidy.
Both sides are read from Ru-Yi's own translations, made directly from the source languages. That is the only reason a course like this is possible — the Southern material had to be translated from Pāli here, because no other English version could be quoted at length.
The Visuddhimagga
Buddhaghosa's 5th-century Path of Purification — the most complete manual of Theravāda practice that survives, and the single book the tradition would keep if it could keep only one. Translated here directly from the Pāli.
- Ch. 1 — virtue, in seven questions
- Ch. 8 — the recollection of death
- Ch. 9 — the four divine abidings
- Ch. 14 — what a person is made of, in exhaustive detail
The Chinese treatises and sūtras
What East Asia actually built on — Xuánzàng's great synthesis of Yogācāra, Nāgārjuna's root verses on the middle way, the Pure Land scriptures, and the bodhisattva precepts. Translated here from the classical Chinese.
- 成唯識論 — the self refuted, and the storehouse consciousness
- 瑜伽師地論 — affliction, karma, and the bodhisattva's ground
- 中論 — emptiness, and what it does to the four truths
- 梵網經 · 無量壽經 · 普賢行願品
- Give both traditions' answers to all six questions, in their own terms, without flattening either into a version of the other.
- Tell the difference between a genuine disagreement and a difference of question — which is most of what separates these two bodies of literature, and almost never gets said.
- Read a technical Buddhist treatise without being defeated by it. Both the Visuddhimagga and the Cheng Weishi Lun are difficult books; by the end you will have read real stretches of each.
- Hold a position without needing the other side to be wrong — which this course treats as a skill to be practised rather than a temperament you either have or don't.
- Know where to go next in either direction, because you will have met the major texts of both.
Seven steps rather than the Academy's usual six — because reading the answer twice is the entire point of this course, and each reading gets its own step.
All nine sessions are live. Three of the six questions need two sessions; the others take one.
- Nothing to buy. Every text is on this site in full, in Ru-Yi's own translation, with the Pāli or the Chinese alongside.
- Read a Whole Sūtra first, if you can. Not required, but this course assumes you have read a scripture end to end at least once and know what that feels like. Several sessions call back to it directly.
- Patience with technical prose. The Visuddhimagga counts things. The Cheng Weishi Lun argues with opponents you have never heard of. Both are worth it, and neither is skimmed here.
- A willingness not to decide. The course does not adjudicate, and it will not tell you which tradition is right. If that is unsatisfying, it is worth noticing why.