Jan Willis (BA and MA in Philosophy from Cornell University; PhD in Indic and Buddhist Studies from Columbia University) is Professor of Religion Emerita at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the U.S. for five decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for over fifty years. She is the author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (1972), On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi (1979), Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition (1995); and the editor of Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (1989). Additionally, Willis has published numerous articles and essays on various topics in Buddhism—Buddhist meditation, hagiography, women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and race. In 2001, her memoir, Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey was published, and in 2008, it was re-issued by Wisdom Publications as Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist—One Woman’s Spiritual Journey. Her book Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra–Collected Essays by Jan Willis was published in 2020.
Dr. Willis is one of the earliest American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, having studied Buddhism with Tibetan teachers since the 1970s, in Nepal, India, and the United States. She was also one of the first western students of Lama Thubten Yeshe. Jan discovered dharma as a path to healing the trauma of racism growing up in the segregated south and has forged paths for the integration of Buddhism and social and political justice. In October and November of 2012, Jan spent seven weeks in a Buddhist nunnery in Thailand and, in September of 2013, she walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain.
Profiled in major national media, including Newsweek magazine’s “Spirituality in America” issue in 2005, she has been named one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium” (TIME magazine, December 2000), and one of Ebony magazine’s “Power 150” most influential African Americans. In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
Maitripa College has been honored to host Dr. Willis for numerous public talks and as a guest professor. She presented weekend talks on “Women and Buddhism” in 2008, followed by teaching Shantideva’s “Entering onto the Bodhisattva’s Path” in 2009. In 2015, a talk entitled “How Gurus ‘Ripen’ their Students to Receive Key Instructions”, included reflections on her own teachers. In the Fall of 2017, Jan Willis offered a three-week course at Maitripa College entitled “Making the Invisible, Visible: The Other Side of ‘Perfect’: A Multi-media and Interactive Exploration of Race and Racism in the US,” accompanied by a public talk on “Dharma and Activism”. In Fall 2019, Professor Willis co-taught the College course “Women in Buddhism” and offered a public talk to the community, “The Buddha’s Wisdom: The Importance of Dependent Origination”. In 2025, Dr. Willis will present, “Enlightened in One Lifetime; Ganden Mahamudra Oral Tradition Masters” narrating the sacred biographies of several of the earliest scholar-practitioners in the Geluk lineage.
See also:
A Genuine Guru: Jan Willis Remembers Lama Yeshe (Mandala Magazine)