Jan Willis and BCBS Director of Studies William Edelglass explore Jan’s life and Buddhist engagement, drawing particularly on her memoir, Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, as well as her more recent collection, Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra. This program is freely offered.
When Jan Willis was offered a scholarship to attend Cornell, a cross was burned on her family’s lawn in Alabama. Raised as a Baptist in the Jim Crow South, engaged in the Civil Rights movement, she has devoted her life to understanding the roots of hatred and violence and exploring possibilities for peace. In the late 1960s, this exploration led Willis to study with Tibetan exile teachers in Nepal and a Ph.D. in Indic and Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Over the next half-century, she established herself as one of the leading scholars in Buddhist Studies, publishing work on a wide range of themes: Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist meditation, women in Buddhism, biography and hagiography, Buddhism and race, and the ways in which work in philosophy and the social sciences can complement classical and contemporary Buddhist thought.
