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Jan Willis

"Jan Willis (BA and MA in Philosophy, Cornell University; PhD in Indic and Buddhist Studies, Columbia University) is Professor of Religion and Walter A. Crowell Professor of the Social Sciences at Wesleyan. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland and the United States for more than three decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for twenty-five years. One of the earliest American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, Professor Willis has published numerous essays and articles on Buddhist mediation, hagiography, and women and Buddhism."  (Wesleyan University)

"Willis, a coal miner's daughter, was born in  Docena, Alabama. During the 1950s and '60s the town was a stronghold of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan where the commonality of economic oppression made the need to push blacks to the bottom of the heap even more desperate.

Willis was almost small enough to fit under the bed when the KKK burned a cross in the alleyway beside her home. At 4, she confounded her mother by falling in love with Dvorak and Rimsky-Korsakov and deciding to become a conductor. She was 5 when her mother pronounced her ''evil'' for being ''smart'' and 14 when baptized a Baptist.

But it was in 1963, that Willis left home, heading north to Ithaca, N.Y., for the Telluride Association's special summer program at Cornell University. She was a militant-leaning Black Power college student bearing white blood from three generations back, raised in the Jim Crow South. But at college, her intelligence was the norm, not the exception. She made friends who didn't see ''race'' when they looked at her. She fell in love with philosophers and with Buddhism, and she took an offer to study Buddhist philosophy in India for a year.

Willis had vowed to continue her studies in Nepal after college. But when Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago Black Panther Party, was killed in 1969, it challenged her to take up the cause of civil rights at home." (Jackson Sun)

Bibliography:
The Diamond Light
Dreaming Me
Enlightened Beings
On Knowing Reality
The Tattwartha Chapter of Asanga's Bodhisattvabhumi

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Last Updated: 06 March 2002               Send Comments to our Webmaster