Prof Buswell is definitely extremely knowledgeable. The guy even published his encyclopedia of Buddhist terms. But he isn't the best at teaching it. He uses slides but they usually have pictures or few specific phrases. So if you want to follow what is happening, you have to listen to him and not care about the slides. The problem with that is 1) you tend miss quite a few things that he says which might be important because he crams a lot of information with a single sentence and he speaks relatively fast, so while writing what he just said, you will miss the next sentence and the cycle continues 2) if you want to go home and review, the slides are not very helpful because there is hardly any content. So you can say that the class is primarily driven by the professor's speeches. For me, my TA was a blessing. Eric was super cool and helpful. He was very understanding and would also put in effort to explain concepts if you approached him. I also appreciated that Prof Buswell announced that the final would be a take-home during week 8, so that was very helpful because it gave us time to condense our understandings and think about it. His questions were sort of vague during the midterm and the sad thing was, even though I was up to date with readings and lecture notes, I was still kind of confused as to what his questions really meant and what he expected. The questions sound very deep and philosophical but later I realized, they were actually intending to ask something very similar. So if you are someone who is not used to deep, philosophical questions like me, this might not be the best class for you. But I definitely have a significantly better understanding of Buddhism.

Buswell is incredibly knowledgable on this topic. His lectures are very interesting, only if you already had interest in the subject. I could see how it would be hard to follow him if you were not already interested in the topic as he talks very soft and tends to go on tangents. For me, this was actually not a problem for me because I was very interested in the topic prior to class; however, I did have trouble paying attention sometimes when he talked super quietly. Overall, I would highly recommend this class as a writing two requirement if you are interested in history or religions. I would also HIGHLY recommend Oh Mee Lee as your TA, because she was incredibly knowledgable, invested in each student and helpful.