The first module introduces students to the basic repertoire of early Indian Buddhist meditation practices, with a focus on the historical Buddha’s cultural context, the story of his quest to attain awakening, and the doctrinal and dialogical underpinnings of his teachings. We explore how the ascetic milieu that the Buddha was a part of conditioned the evolution of his teachings on meditation, and how his practice models were articulated within a cosmological framework that he shared—at least partially—with diverse groups of spiritual seekers.

In the second module, we explore doctrinal and practice developments that occurred in the centuries following the historical Buddha’s death, the most consequential of which was the emergence of Mahāyāna Buddhism. These developments set the stage for the blossoming of a range of new meditation models that conditioned how Buddhism developed as it spread to new cultural contexts. We focus on the figure of the yogācāra or “yoga practitioner” and explore how the image of this ideal practitioner gets transfigured as Buddhism spreads to Central Asia and China in the first five centuries of the Common Era. This exploration leads into an analysis of two uniquely Chinese meditation practice traditions: The Tiantai tradition of the meditation master Zhiyi (538–597 CE), and the Chan (Zen) tradition traced to the enigmatic Bodhidharma.

In the third module, we explore two premodern meditation traditions that are important in Tibetan Buddhism: Kamalaśīla’s 8th-century “Progression of Meditation” texts and the Great Perfection teachings of the Third Dzogchen Rinpoche (1759–1792 CE). In exploring these traditions, we focus on continuities with earlier practices while also probing how new scholastic and textual contexts and cultural narratives shaped how meditation traditions develop and are articulated in the specific cultural context of Tibet. We also reflect on the historically dense nature of Tibetan practice traditions and how tantric and non-tantric strands of Indian thought come together in various ways to form philosophically layered modes of practice. We end this module with a bridge to our fourth module, exploring how the “crazy wisdom” teachings of the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa were central in the spread of Buddhism to Europe and North American in the mid-twentieth century.

In our final module, we follow the path of transmission of Buddhist ideas and practices from Asia to North America, Europe and beyond in the second half of the twentieth century. Touching on points of contact in colonial encounters, diasporic migration transmissions, and New Age receptions, we explore how Buddhist meditation practices find their way into the mainstream of global wellness culture, and how they become differently transfigured in the hands of those with distinct political, economic, and religious investments. Students will be pushed to reflect on how these more recent developments—many of which remain in progress—mirror earlier transcultural transmissions while also bearing the hallmarks of a uniquely global late capitalist context.