Dharma Matters

Jan Willis’s distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of Buddhism spans fifty years, including thirty-six years at Wesleyan University. Coming from Birmingham, Alabama, a child of Jim Crow, she marched there with Dr. King in 1963. She first met Tibetan Buddhists in India and Nepal when she was nineteen. While traveling through Asia during the early 1970s, she became a student of Lama Thubten Yeshe, who encouraged her academic pursuits. She went on to earn degrees in philosophy and Indic and Buddhist Studies from Cornell and Columbia Universities, and has published widely on Tibetan Buddhism, women and Buddhism, Buddhism and race, Buddhist meditation, and hagiography. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the United States for five decades. In 2000 Time magazine named Willis one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millenium.” She is the author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation; On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi; Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition; Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist—One Woman's Spiritual Journey; and the editor of Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet.