I'm not a scholar, a monk, or a teacher
I'm just someone who got curious about Buddhism and didn't know where to start.
I found myself in Thailand, alone, at the messy tail end of a long relationship. I tried a lot of things to work through it, but it was Buddhism — something I'd been vaguely aware of my whole life but never actually looked into — where I started to find some peace. Peace wasn't even a word I fully understood the meaning of until then.
So I started meditating. Alone, with apps, but diligently — every day. After a few months I went to Dharamsala, India, and sat at the Tushita Meditation Centre. My daily sits got longer. Between the sitting, the short Dharma talks there, and hours spent finding good Dharma talks on YouTube, I realized the further I went, the more I was peeling back layers — an onion of insight, one layer revealing another underneath.
The problem wasn't a lack of information — there's plenty out there. It was that it was scattered everywhere, and never at the level I actually needed. Either too shallow to be useful, or straight into Sanskrit terms and centuries of history before I had any foundation to hang it on. All I wanted, at the start, was someone to answer a few basic questions in order: What is Buddhism, actually? What are the different traditions? Why did they split in the first place? And given all that, where should I even start, and why?
So I built this site to be the resource I wish I'd had — a plain, honest starting point for people who are curious but have no background at all. No assumed knowledge, no jargon left unexplained, no pretending Buddhism is one single, simple thing when really it's a very old tradition that split and grew in different directions for real historical reasons.
What this site is
- A simple introduction to who the Buddha was and what he actually taught
- A plain explanation of the three main traditions — Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna — and why they're different
- Straightforward answers to basic questions, like why people meditate at all
- A starting point, not a finishing point
What this site isn't
This isn't a scholarly deep dive, and I'm not claiming any special authority. I've done my best to make sure everything here is accurate and checked against reliable sources, but I'd encourage anyone who gets curious to keep reading beyond this site — talk to practitioners, read primary texts, visit a local sangha if there's one near you.