Giving up worldly concerns, gaining wisdom

Dr. Jan Willis

Dr. Jan Willis is an author, activist, scholar, professor, and long-time Buddhist practitioner. She is one of Lama Yeshe’s earliest Western disciples and, like Ven. Thubten Chodron, sees him as one of her root spiritual mentors. Jan grew up in the Jim Crow South of 1950s and 60s and took part in the Civil Rights movement. While traveling through Asia in the early 1970s, she met Lama Yeshe and discovered Dharma as a path to healing the trauma of racism. “[Buddhism] has helped me in real ways to find what I was looking for as a young person in a world that was violent,” she explained. “It showed me how to locate deep wounds that racism caused in my early life … and having found them, how to heal them.” Lama Yeshe encouraged Jan’s academic pursuits. Now a Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University, she holds BA and MA degrees from Cornell University and a PhD from Columbia University. In addition, she has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland and the U.S. for over four decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism throughout that time. Jan has published several books and numerous articles on Buddhism. Her best known work is her personal memoir, Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist—One Woman’s Spiritual Journey. TIME Magazine named Jan Willis one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium”; Ebony called her one of its “Power 150” most influential African-Americans; and she was profiled in a 2005 Newsweek article about “Spirituality in America.”