What makes a good life? What makes a good death? How should we live to prepare for the end of this life? This six-week/12-hour video course on Buddhist teachings on living and dying will prepare students to face the challenges of death and dying as part of living toward awakening. Teachings offer multiple perspectives from Buddhism and a series of guided meditations to ground doctrine in lived experience.

Where do our emotions come from? What kinds of emotions do we experience? How should we deal with them in daily life? This fourteen-hour recorded audio course covers the Buddhist Yogācāra (Consciousness-Only) typology of the mind and emotions, as well as the implications for our life and practice.

The Vimalakīrti Sūtra is one of the most creative Mahāyāna teachings on nonduality, emptiness, and expedient means. The protagonist Vimalakīrti's teachings inspired later Chan traditions of “extemporaneous dialogues,” “turning words,” and ultimately “gong’ans” (koans). In the eleven lectures of this class, Guo Gu highlights many key lessons from this Sūtra for Chan practitioners to apply in their everyday lives.

The Platform Scripture relates the life and teachings of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng. This seminal scripture distinguished Chan from Indic predecessors and laid the foundation for Buddhism across East Asia. In this 9-hour audio course, Guo Gu cuts to the heart of this text, sharing the most essential teachings and practices of all of Chinese Buddhism.

This course surveys the major doctrinal developments of the Buddhist tradition, elaborating the richness of the theories and practices that culminated with Chan Buddhism. The course includes 13 guided meditations by Guo Gu to illustrate the aspects of practice that are emphasized by the surveyed Buddhist schools.

This course presents important Buddhist principles and shows how they are described or discussed in the Early Buddhist Texts (the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas). It covers a wide range of topics, including generosity, ethics, aggregates, karma, dealing with anger, mindfulness and meditation practices, emptiness, the evils of comparison, how to deal with thoughts, bias against others, and much more.