2027 Timeless Wisdom: Exploring Buddhist Teachings through Similes and Stories (3)

This eight-week online Buddhist study course explores the Buddha's teachings through the similes and stories he used to make subtle points clear. Offered through the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Vermont, and co-sponsored with Bodhi Courses, it is the third series of Timeless Wisdom, a sutta study program in the Theravada tradition. Shaila Catherine leads the weekly live sessions on Zoom. It suits beginning and experienced practitioners who already keep a mindfulness meditation practice and want an approachable way into the Pāli Canon.

The Buddha spoke in images his listeners knew: mountains and oceans, lions and jackals, archery, purified gold, incubated eggs, chariots, mirages, bubbles, sandcastles. Farmers understood sowing seeds and yoking oxen, warriors understood training horses, craftsmen understood refining gold. This course brings those same images to meditation students today.

What to Expect

The course is organized into eight thematic modules:

- Maturing Our Practice
- Sense Doors and Attachments
- Kamma, Conditions, and Results
- Unaffected and Equanimous
- On Speech
- Right View and Impermanence
- Faultless Awakening
- Happiness

Each module begins with a brief recorded reflection or guided meditation, 15 to 30 minutes long. A selected set of sutta readings follows, with similes that illuminate a single dhamma theme. Reading assignments take between 30 and 120 minutes per topic. Readings are drawn from the Middle Length Discourses, Numerical Discourses, Connected Discourses, Long Discourses, Sutta Nipata, and Udāna. Creative and reflective Try This exercises help you test the teachings in your own experience, and peer-led discussion forums keep the conversation going between meetings.

The live sessions meet on Wednesday evenings for two hours, 6:30 to 8:30 PM Eastern (3:30 to 5:30 PM Pacific), across eight weeks. Study, reflection, discussion, and meditation are woven together, so the sutta material becomes something to practice with, not only to read. The sessions are recorded as audio, and the recordings stay available in the online classroom until the course closes. Even so, attending the calls as often as you can is strongly encouraged. Compared with other Bodhi Courses, this series has streamlined content and less reading and listening, and the conference calls carry more of the weight.

About Shaila Catherine

Shaila Catherine leads the weekly online meetings and guides the series. Her sessions present the similes, open them to discussion, and connect them to contemporary mindfulness-based meditation.

The Setting

The program is hosted by the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Vermont, and takes place entirely online through Zoom. After enrolling, you receive a letter from Bodhi Courses with login information for Bodhi Classroom, where the modules, readings, forums, and recordings are kept.

Before You Go

- Experience level: Beginning and experienced practitioners are welcome. No prior study of the suttas is needed, though the course assumes an established mindfulness meditation practice.
- Series: Bodhi Courses offers five Timeless Wisdom courses. Each stands alone, covers different topics and readings, and is not sequential, so you can begin here without having taken the others.
- Language: English.
- Included: Classroom login, the recorded reflections and guided meditations, curated sutta readings, Try This exercises, discussion forums, and audio recordings of the weekly meetings.
- Not included: Dāna for the teacher, which the program encourages but does not include in the fee.
- Fees: Pricing is tiered, and subsidized rates do not require an application.
- Cancellation: If you cancel before the program starts, you are eligible for a refund minus an administrative fee. Fees are nonrefundable once the program begins.