The name itself carries a philosophical argument. "Dharma Realm" is a Buddhist term for the totality of existence -- the universe and everything in it, seen and unseen. Hsuan Hua chose the name deliberately, linking it to the Latin root of "university": universitas, the whole. Where Western tradition frames the university as a place to study the totality of knowledge, DRBU frames it as a place to study the totality of being. The distinction matters. Knowledge, in the DRBU model, is not just information to be absorbed but wisdom to be activated. Hsuan Hua called this "developing inherent wisdom," a pedagogical philosophy grounded in the Mahayana Buddhist conviction that all beings possess an innate capacity for awakening. The university's job is not to fill empty vessels but to help students recognize what they already carry.

DRBU's curriculum is a variation on the Great Books model that schools like St. John's College have practiced for decades, but with a critical difference: the canon is not exclusively Western. The four-year Bachelor of Arts program weaves together ten strands -- Buddhist Classics, Western Classics, Indian Classics, Chinese Classics, Language, Mathematics, Natural Science, Rhetoric and Writing, Music, and a Capstone. Students read Homer and the Bhagavad Gita, Euclid and the Diamond Sutra, Descartes and Zhuangzi. The two-year Master of Arts in Buddhist Classics goes deeper still, pairing primary Buddhist texts with comparative hermeneutics drawn from Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Judith Butler. A Graduate Certificate in Buddhist Translation trains students to render Chinese Buddhist texts into English -- painstaking work that requires not just linguistic skill but philosophical understanding of what the original authors meant.

Once each semester, DRBU does something no other accredited American university does: it stops. All classes are suspended. Non-essential campus work halts. The entire community -- students, faculty, and staff -- enters a week-long Contemplative Exercise Immersion. Designed and led by faculty, the retreat is a structured period of silence, meditation, and self-reflection held on the monastery grounds. DRBU describes it as a laboratory experience, a chance for students to "unplug from their ordinary routines to directly experience disciplined forms of self-reflection, centering practices, and more intuitive modes of knowing." The practice reflects DRBU's core conviction that education is not purely intellectual. Reading the Heart Sutra is one thing. Sitting with its implications in sustained silence is another. Contemplative exercises also appear within regular classroom time, blurring the line between seminar and practice session.

In 1976, the same year DRBU was founded, Hsuan Hua and Catholic Cardinal Paul Yu Bin established the Institute for World Religions. The partnership was unusual -- a Chinese Chan master and a Chinese Catholic cardinal, both convinced that harmony among religions was a prerequisite for a just world. The Institute, now based at DRBU's Berkeley campus, has maintained one of the longest-running Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogues in the United States, with the Zen-Chan Buddhist Catholic Dialogue meeting annually since 2002. DRBU also partners with the Graduate Theological Union and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, an affiliation that places a small Buddhist university in conversation with one of the most prominent ecumenical academic communities in the country. Faculty and students collaborate with the Buddhist Text Translation Society, publishing scholarship in Vajra Bodhi Sea, a journal of orthodox Buddhism in continuous print since 1970.

Students eat their meals in the Five Contemplations Dining Hall alongside monks and nuns. Everything served is vegetarian, consistent with the monastery's principle of compassion toward all beings. A two-story library holds Buddhist canons in multiple languages, and the Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas -- the spiritual center of the campus -- hosts ceremonies and meditation from four in the morning until nine-thirty at night. Student life reflects this contemplative setting in quieter ways too. Clubs include a Pali language group, two tea clubs, and pottery, tai chi, and yoga groups. The student magazine, Mirror Flower Water Moon, publishes visual art, academic work, personal reflections, and poetry twice a year. Students move through their programs as a cohort, reading the same texts at the same time, building a shared intellectual life that mirrors the communal rhythms of the monastery around them.