International Buddhist Academy is an online Buddhist school, managed by Pure Land Buddhist Center of Southern California. Our focus is on nurturing people's skills to share Buddhism, and we send missionaries to all over the world. Currently, we have offices in the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as the Philippines.
Up to recently, our activities were centered on sharing Buddhism with Japanese communities around the world as most missionaries are and were from Japan. Today, people around the globe show interest in learning Buddhism, and we have thought long and hard about how to best convey the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha to people across borders. In an ideal world, we would go everywhere, build a temple, and teach Buddhism in the local language. This would require time and overcoming many hurdles, however.
And so, we began to share Buddhism through the Internet, using English, the world's most common language.
Buddhism was originally taught by Shakyamuni Buddha in India about 2,600 years ago. It was then translated into Chinese characters and spread to Japan. Since the Japanese language is based on Chinese characters, Japanese people were able to understand Buddhism with relative ease. Be that as it may, the translation of Buddhist texts from Japanese to English and the spread of Buddhism in the rest of the world are still in their infancy. We believe that sharing the profound teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha in English via the Internet will allow us to convey Buddhism to a greater number of people into future generations.
We will continue to build and update this website. If you are interested, please sign up for email subscription so that you can receive email newsletter and update notices.
Aside from this website, we also offer a separate online Buddhist course (http://www.purelandschool.com/). To enroll in this program, please request to speak with our staff on Skype and become a member.
Thank you for visiting.
Sincerely,
Takahiro Katayama
Administrator of International Buddhist Academy