I’ve over-committed myself for the fall, teaching two courses at the University of Cincinnati’s Osher Lifelong Learning Center, and leading a Dharma Study Group at St. John’s Unitarian Church. I’ll be using this site to coordinate all of those activities.

All three programs are pretty full, which says a great deal about the intensity of interest in Buddhism in these troubled times.

Here’s more info on each program, along with a link to the syllabus/overview page for the program.

• OLLI Course: The Teachings of the Buddha. From the OLLI catalog course description: “In this course, we will examine eight of the most significant and widely known of the Buddha’s discourses.  In our discussion of each discourse, we will look at the events in the Buddha’s life that provide the context for the discourse, and we will see how the ideas discussed in the discourse relate to the historical development of Buddhism and how those ideas remain relevant to the task of maintaining sanity and equanimity in a confused and turbulent world.  The course will be presented as a general introduction to the Buddha’s life and thought.”
• OLLI Course: Important Topics in Mainstream Buddhism. From the OLLI catalog course description: “We will discuss some fundamental concepts of Buddhism, including Dharma, the Law that governs the natural world as well as the results of our ethical decisions; Karma, ethically significant action; Buddhist cosmology and the Buddhist understanding of how events unfold from preceding conditions; Nirvana, the characteristic condition of an enlightened mind; and the Eightfold Path to enlightenment.  We will also look into the history of Buddhism and how different traditions understand the fundamental ideas.  Finally, we’ll look at how Buddhism came to the West and the shape it’s taken here.”
• Dharma Study Class. “The Dharma Study group will take as its study text “In the Buddha’s Words”, an anthology by the Brooklyn-born monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. The texts in the anthology provide an excellent introduction to the Pali Canon, the oldest and most probably authentic source of the Buddha’s teachings. The class will be organized as a discussion group; each week, we will read one chapter of our text and, after a brief introduction to provide historical perspective, we will look at how the teachings we’ve read fit into Buddhist doctrine and what we can learn from them about how to live happily and with a measure of equanimity in a world marked by impermanence and widespread suffering.”