UCLA Scholar to Head New Korean Buddhist Research Institute

Robert Buswell, who once dropped out of college to become a monk in Asia, directs the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies.

My friend and mentor Robert Buswell, who is a distinguished professor of Buddhist Studies in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at UCLA, has been appointed founding director of a new Buddhist Research Institute at Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea. He will hold this title for the next year, during which he will work to introduce Korean Buddhist history, culture and practice to Buddhist scholars and to citizens worldwide. Buswell began his studies of Buddhism while he was in high school. He became interested in Buddhist doctrine and meditation and started studying Chinese and Sanskrit.

Robert dropped out of college in 1972 and spent a year each in Thailand and Hong Kong as a Theravada Buddhist monk. While he was in Thailand, he met two Korean monks who introduced him to Korean Buddhism and persuaded him to visit their monastery in Korea. Buswell then trekked to Songgwangsa, or Piney Expanse Monastery, in Korea’s South Cholla province, in 1974 at the age of 21, where he practiced Zen meditation with Zen Master Kusan for five years as a Buddhist monk. At the behest of Zen Master Kusan who told him to return to the West and teach Buddhism and following his total of seven years in Asia, he returned to UC Berkeley to pursue a BA, MA, and finally PhD in Buddhist Studies in 1985. Robert Buswell is the translator of many seminal Buddhist Texts as well as an author of the important "Zen Monastic Experience" which Chronicles the studies of Zen Buddhism in Korea.

Buswell will hold a dual faculty position at UCLA and Dongguk University for the next year.