A non-sectarian, citation-backed guide to early Buddhism.
Ask anything about practice or doctrine. Get grounded answers with tappable citations to the early suttas — so you can verify it for yourself. Designed for curious beginners and skeptical empiricists, with enough depth for committed practitioners.
Free daily practice included. 7-day free trial for unlimited.
Not a creed. A method.
You don't have to swallow anything on faith — just give it enough trust to run the experiment.
The core loop: learn, ask, reinforce, sit, return.
BuddhaUR is built around a repeatable daily rhythm:
Core features
A teacher you can talk to
"What exactly are the Five Aggregates?" "How does Right Speech play out at work?" "What's a practical way to meet restlessness in meditation?" Ask anything — answers cite the relevant suttas so you can read them yourself.
Citations you can tap
Every answer is grounded in the earliest Buddhist texts. Tap inline citations to verify — links go straight to Bhikkhu Sujato's translations on SuttaCentral. Transparent scholarship, not hand-wavy magic.
Daily Dhamma talk
A personalized teaching each morning based on your journey — your lesson history, quiz topics, and conversations. 1-15 minutes, saved to history.
47+ guided lessons
Learn in arcs, not fragments. Lessons cover essentials from the Four Noble Truths to Nibbana, plus 9 dedicated meditation lessons. Each can branch into story, metaphor, or drill-down questions.
Quizzes + adaptive practice
Turn "I read it" into "I know it." Adaptive practice finds the topics you miss and brings them back at the right difficulty. Efficient, honest, and surprisingly motivating.
Meditation timer + reflection
A calm timer with gong or vibration alerts. Jot reflection notes, then "chat about this session." Your notes feed a private memory that helps the teacher remember what you're working on.
See it in action
A quick tour across lessons, quizzes, meditation, and more.
See the shape of the teachings.
Four Noble Truths. Eightfold Path. Five Aggregates. Five Hindrances. Seven Factors of Enlightenment. Dependent Origination. Three Characteristics. These "numbered frameworks" interlock in ways that aren't obvious until you see them together. BuddhaUR lets you browse them as an interactive visual map, so the relationships start to click.
Start free. Go unlimited if you want.
Daily allowance included
- 1 lesson per day
- 1 quiz per day
- 1 Daily Dhamma talk per day (up to 5 min)
- 5 chat messages per day
- Unlimited meditation timer
- 9 meditation lessons (always free)
- Conversation history + streaks
$4.99/month · $39.99/year (save 33%) · $99 lifetime
Unlimited lessons, quizzes, chat, adaptive practice, and longer Daily Dhamma talks (up to 15 min). Every subscription includes a 7-day free trial.
If revenue exceeds costs, we expand free access or reduce the price. The goal is access, not gatekeeping.
FAQ
Full FAQ
From David Kooi
I built BuddhaUR for the same reason I've built most things: I wanted to understand what was true.
My background is unapologetically rational — mathematician, statistician, student of cognitive science, raised on materialist philosophy. I came at the world with calipers and a hypothesis, and for a long time that was enough.
When I discovered that Robert Wright — a sober evolutionary thinker — wrote Why Buddhism Is True, the empiricist in me did a double-take. So I did what felt necessary: a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat to see whether the claims matched the phenomenology.
What I found wasn't a creed. It was a method. You don't have to swallow anything on faith — just give it enough trust to run the experiment.
BuddhaUR is my attempt to put the earliest sources in your hand, help you see the "numbered frameworks" as a coherent map, and invite you to test the claims in the lab of your own attention.
"You give it enough trust to run the experiment."
