Richard Shankman

Richard Shankman is a Buddhist meditation and dharma teacher who lives in Oakland, California. He teaches classes and residential retreats at dharma centers and groups across North America.

He began meditating in 1970 in a Hindu-oriented yoga tradition and spent several years living in an ashram, practicing concentration-based meditation. In the mid-1970s he moved to Buddhist practice. He has sat many silent, intensive retreats, some as long as eleven months.

Richard is the guiding teacher of the Metta Dharma Foundation, a non-residential meditation center in Berkeley. It offers a weekly meditation group, monthly daylongs, classes, workshops and residential retreats. His teaching brings compassion, mindfulness, concentration (samadhi), jhana and insight together as one integrated path. He is interested in how these practices can help people live peacefully and with open hearts, creating less suffering and more well-being for themselves and others.

He co-founded Mindful Schools, which for 20 years trained educators to learn mindfulness and teach it to youth. Its online and in-person courses trained thousands of people, who have reached over 300,000 young people. He also co-founded the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies, which balances scholarly inquiry into Buddhist teachings with serious meditation practice.

In the 1970s Richard taught meditation at San Quentin State Prison, the Marin County jail and a San Francisco drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. Programs he started continue at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Men's Correctional Training Facility near Soledad.

He is the author of The Experience of Samadhi: An In-Depth Investigation of Buddhist Meditation (Shambhala Publications, 2008) and The Art and Skill of Buddhist Meditation (New Harbinger Publications, 2015). He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MA in Philosophy and Religion with an emphasis in Buddhist Studies.