Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Donald S. Lopez Jr. is among the foremost scholars of Buddhism, whose work consistently distinguishes Buddhist reality from Western fantasy. A professor at the University of Michigan and author of numerous essential books on Buddhist thought and practice, he's spent decades studying Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, including a formative year spent living in a Tibetan monastery in India. His latest book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, tackles the formidable challenge of understanding what we can actually know about the historical Buddha.

Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha's 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha's omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism's elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the "peaceful" Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha's son Rahula, Buddhism's global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 6th, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, listeners, this is Tyler.
0:06.2	Please mark your calendars for Friday, January 9th.
0:09.7	We're hosting a CWT listener meetup in Austin, Texas at Parkside on East 6th Street.
0:17.6	This is your chance to connect with fellow fans and meet me and also the entire
0:22.3	CWT team in person and to enjoy some great conversation over light refreshments.
0:29.1	We'll have a Q&A session, plus plenty of time to mix and mingle. Space is limited in
0:34.6	filling up fast, so click the link in the show notes to register now.
0:39.0	It's first come, first serve, and plus ones are absolutely welcome.
0:43.3	Just make sure they register at the link as well.
0:46.5	Hope to see you there.
0:52.5	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:57.7	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
1:01.8	Learn more at Mercatus.org.
1:04.0	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
1:08.7	visit Conversationswith with Tyler.com.
1:14.7	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
1:18.8	Today, I am very excited to be chatting with Donald S. Lopez Jr.
1:23.4	I think of Donald as the West's leading expert on Buddhism.
1:28.3	He's a professor at the University of Michigan,
1:31.1	the author of many, many books on Buddhism,
1:33.6	which I think I've read all of.
1:35.8	He's one of the editors of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Buddhism,
	...

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