Stories the Buddha Told
This is the door. If you have never read anything about Buddhism, have no intention of becoming a Buddhist, and are not entirely sure the whole thing is for you — this course was built for exactly that person, and it will not try to talk you out of any of it.
There is no doctrine here. There are no technical terms — no Sanskrit words to memorise, no numbered lists, nothing to look up. Each session hands you one story and one question, and then mostly gets out of the way. A husband and wife who bet each other not to speak. A woodcarver and a painter who cannot stop deceiving one another. A mother who weeps for the wrong son. A man who spends everything he has to buy a turtle.
Some of these are stories the Buddhist tradition has told about the Buddha's own life. Most are stories it has told for two thousand years because he told them — parables collected, in the year 516, into the largest anthology of Buddhist narrative in the Chinese language, and translated in full on this site. They are funny, cruel, tender, and occasionally very strange. Almost none of them end the way you expect.
You do not need to believe anything, know anything, or sit still. You need about fifteen minutes and a willingness to be caught out by a story.
- Ten stories you will remember — which is a genuinely unusual thing to get from anything you read in ten weeks.
- A sense of what kind of thing Buddhism is, arrived at from the inside, through how it talks — rather than from someone's summary of what it believes.
- The habit of letting a story ask you a question instead of answering one. Every session ends on a question nobody closes for you.
- Ten small things tried once each, in an ordinary week, with no equipment and nobody watching.
- And if you want it, a clear idea of where to go next — the Academy's next course hands you a whole scripture, and this one is designed to make that feel like the obvious step rather than a leap.
Fifteen to twenty minutes, including the story itself. The same six steps every week.
All ten sessions are live. Each links to the full story on this site.
- Nothing at all. Every story is on this site, in full, free, in plain English.
- No previous anything. If a term cannot be explained in the sentence it appears in, it does not appear.
- No commitment. You are not being recruited. Several of these stories are simply good stories, and that is allowed to be the whole of it.
- A tolerance for odd endings. These are not fables with tidy morals attached. Some of them end badly for people who did nothing wrong.
Two sources, both translated in full on this site. The life story comes from the Buddhacarita — "Acts of the Buddha," a poem written in Sanskrit some five hundred years after his death and translated into Chinese in the fifth century. The parables come from the Jīng Lǜ Yì Xiàng, a fifty-fascicle anthology compiled by imperial decree in 516 CE, which gathered Buddhist narrative from across the entire canon and sorted it by subject — heavens, kings, queens, merchants, ordinary men, ordinary women, animals, hells. It is the largest surviving work of its kind, and every fascicle of it is on this site.