This course is produced by New York Insight in collaboration with the Sati Center. You’re free to register with either center.

5 Tuesdays, October 27th – November 24th
4-5:30pm Pacific
New York Insight and Sati Center, Online

The Buddha was known for radical egalitarianism—denying the meaningfulness of caste and welcoming all castes and genders into the monastic Saṅgha. Yet the named laypeople in the suttas are overwhelmingly upper-caste. Does this mean the Dhamma was mostly for the socially privileged?

A closer look reveals something striking: upper-caste listeners pleased with the teachings often went for refuge as lay followers, while lower-caste listeners almost always requested ordination. The fullest record of low-caste Buddhist practitioners appears in the poems of the Theragāthā and Therīgāthā, making these collections not just a celebration of awakening across genders, but across the full social spectrum.

In this five-week study series, we’ll explore the hypothesis that the monastic Saṅgha functions—in ancient India and today—as an active social intervention: offering genuine mobility and liberation to people otherwise locked into their conditions by birth. We’ll read suttas on the emptiness of caste and meet some of the Buddha’s low-caste and outcaste followers—Sunīta the flower-scavenger, Upāli the barber, Puṇṇikā the household slave—each of whom became an arahant and respected elder.

And we’ll turn that lens on our own communities: How do wealth, race, education, and class shape who gets to practice and lead today? How can we make this Dhamma we love more effective as a response to systemic oppression?

All are welcome. General familiarity with the Buddha’s teachings is helpful but not required. Recordings of each session will be available on the course page, so please feel free to register even if you can’t make every session in real time.