Best Buddhist Podcasts: Which Are Still Publishing

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 September 2026

Checked against the primary texts · How we check · Report a correction

The best Buddhist podcasts in English, as of September 2026, are Tricycle Talks for interviews, Insight Hour and Heart Wisdom for talks from a teacher, The Zen Studies Podcast for study, Buddhist Geeks if you already sit, and Ven. Pomnyun Sunim’s Dharma Talk for plain answers to ordinary problems. Every show below was checked on 21 September 2026.

To be listed, a show needed a named host or community, a producer, a tradition, and a recent episode we could date. Shows that have stopped are still here, labelled as archives. We have no commercial relationship with anything below, and there are no affiliate links on this site. Nearly everything here is free; where a show sells a paid tier, we say so.

Three things the lists that rank get wrong

• The Bob Thurman Podcast is on nearly every recommendation list. Its feed stopped at Ep. 345 on 7 April 2026, and its host, Robert Thurman, died at Woodstock, New York, on 16 June 2026, aged 84 — a death carried in his New York Times obituary. His own podcast site still posts no notice of it.
• The Lion’s Roar Podcast comes from one of the two major English-language Buddhist magazines. Its archive page prints no dates at all, which is part of the problem; the feed itself has not moved since episode #141, “Buddhist Wisdom for Working with Political Division with Tania Israel”, on 2 November 2024.
• The DharmaRealm still sits in the podcast directory of Buddhist Churches of America, the denomination its two hosts serve, described in the present tense as “an occasional podcast conversation”, with no note that it has stopped. The feed’s last episode is dated 10 April 2020, is titled “DharmaRealm 2.0”, and is ten minutes of the hosts announcing a restart that never came; Listen Notes records no update since that day. BCA’s own news pages had it right in February 2021, when they described the show as “currently on hiatus because of the pandemic as well as time and work demands” — the directory simply never caught up. We are not resolving that disagreement — we are reporting both halves of it.

Dharma talks from one teacher

A teacher speaks, someone records it, the recording goes out. No guest, no arc.

• Insight Hour — Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, in edited retreat talks and Q&A. Ep. 265, “Reflections on Nibbana”, was dated 3 September 2026; the 2026 run has been monthly — nine episodes from 8 January to 3 September — whatever the directory blurbs say about a weekly cadence. Theravada, insight/vipassana stream. Its producer, the Be Here Now Network, is a Ram Dass-derived network, most of whose shows are not Buddhist at all.
• Heart Wisdom — Jack Kornfield, trained in the Thai Forest tradition and a co-founder of Spirit Rock, in talks and dialogues roughly every fortnight. Ep. 331, with Sylvia Boorstein, was dated 9 September 2026. His own site and the network carry the same numbered feed, which is why the date is firm.
• Tara Brach — the pairing is the point: Tara Brach posts one talk and one guided meditation on the same day, most recently on 16 September 2026 and the week before that on 9 September. The spacing is irregular rather than strictly weekly. Brach is a clinical psychologist as well as a teacher, and her register is explicitly therapeutic. Take her episodes on trauma and self-worth as reflection, not treatment.
• Dharmapunx NYC — Josh Korda recording his talks to a live group, roughly an hour, unedited; “The Spectacular Illusion of Being Someone” was dated 9 September 2026, and the show’s page claims 835 episodes. Insight practice crossed heavily with attachment theory and affect science — two recent titles are “How Emotions Are Constructed By the Brain” and “The Haunted Self: Ego States, Parts, Sub-Personalities”, which will tell you whether this is your register. Offered, in the feed’s own words, “for free distribution and dana”, with Venmo, PayPal and Patreon links. One thing to know about the name: see the section on Against the Stream below.
• Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s evening talks — the short talk after evening meditation at Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County, posted most nights; “Trauma” was dated 19 September 2026. This is the Ajahn Lee line, not the Ajahn Chah line that dominates Western forest Buddhism, and Thanissaro Bhikkhu differs sharply from mainstream insight teaching on not-self, jhana and rebirth. His site states the terms plainly: “no price tags, no advertising, no suggested donations, no memberships, no strings attached in any way”.
• The Zen Studies Podcast — Domyo Burk, a Soto Zen priest given Dharma Transmission in 2010, writing scripted episodes for the ear rather than recording talks off a cushion. Begun in 2017, it cycles through eight types, including history, texts and listener questions; Ep. 340, “Five Kinds of Appropriate Longing”, was dated 11 September 2026. The best pick for someone who wants a course of study rather than a recorded talk.
• Dharmabytes — short extracts, three times a week, drawn from the Free Buddhist Audio archive of over 5,000 talks; “The Doors to the Immortal are Open” was dated 21 September 2026. This is the Triratna Buddhist Order, founded in London in 1967 by Sangharakshita — neither insight nor convert Zen, and the only order on this page with a mass Asian wing: its Indian arm, Triratna Bauddha Mahasangha, works among Ambedkarite converts and is reported to account for about half the order’s formal membership. Two honest notes. The clips are short enough to be inspiration rather than instruction. And Triratna publishes on its own website that Sangharakshita had sexual relations with a number of men in the order between 1968 and 1985, that he issued a confessional statement in December 2016, that the order apologised in August 2019, and that its internal review identified 24 men. Worth knowing before you take a lineage on.
• Kevin Griffin: Dharma and Recovery — recordings of Griffin’s Tuesday morning Zoom class, 81 episodes, weekly; the most recent we could date was 7 August 2026. Griffin wrote One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps, co-founded the Buddhist Recovery Network and teaches at Spirit Rock. Theravada, insight stream. This is dharma alongside recovery, not treatment and not a substitute for it — see Buddhism and addiction.

Guided practice, not talks

These lead you through a sit rather than talk about one. It is the thinnest shelf on this page, and the reason is structural: led meditation has largely migrated into subscription apps, which we cover separately on Buddhist apps and online resources. What is left in open podcast feeds is small but genuinely free.

• Tara Brach’s guided meditations — the meditation half of her paired posts, around twenty minutes each: “Meditation: Aware and Alive” on 16 September 2026, “Meditation: Inner Refuge of Calm” on 9 September. You can subscribe to the same feed and simply skip the talks.
• Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s guided meditations — dhammatalks.org keeps guided meditations as a separate audio category with its own feed, alongside the evening talks. Plain instruction in the Thai Forest idiom, with the same no-donations terms as the rest of the site.
• Anukampa Podcast — the Anukampa Bhikkhuni Project’s feed is a mix of dhamma talks, guided meditations and sutta classes led by Venerable Canda, 196 episodes, most recently 28 July 2026. If you want led practice inside a monastic frame rather than a psychological one, start here.

If you are new to sitting at all, read how to meditate first; a recorded voice is easier to follow once you know what it is asking you to do.

Interview and conversation shows

• Tricycle Talks — usually James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, though other editors take the microphone, with teachers, scholars, writers and artists; #156, with Maria Heim, was dated 16 September 2026. Tricycle’s About page says the magazine is unaffiliated with any particular teacher, sect or lineage. The claim is real, though the guest list is still drawn overwhelmingly from the Anglophone Buddhist world.
• Life As It Is — the monthly sister show, co-hosted with Sharon Salzberg; #58 was dated 9 September 2026. Tricycle draws the distinction itself: Talks is about ideas and books, Life As It Is about how a practitioner actually lives.
• The Metta Hour — Salzberg interviewing, roughly fortnightly; Ep. 295, with Caverly Morgan, was dated 15 September 2026. Her guests are often not Buddhist at all — a sports psychologist, an interfaith editor, an activist — which is the show’s character rather than a flaw.
• The Wisdom Podcast — Daniel Aitken for Wisdom Publications, and the strongest entry point here for Tibetan Buddhism: #241 was with Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama’s long-time translator, on 18 September 2026. One of very few interview shows whose guests are largely Asian teachers rather than Western converts — and also a publisher’s show, where the guest usually has a Wisdom book out. That explains the guest list.
• Buddhist Geeks — Vince Fakhoury Horn, running since 2007 and 492 episodes deep, roughly fortnightly; “The Grammar of Social Metta” was dated 16 September 2026. Its tagline is “Evolving Dharma in the Age of the Network”, and its territory is pragmatic dharma: jhana, stages of insight, teachers talking technically to people who already sit. Post-traditional rather than lineage teaching, and it now runs through a Substack feed, which is why older links to it break.
• New Books in Buddhist Studies — an academic interviewing another academic about a new book, on the New Books Network, which credits Marshall Poe as its creator and rotates scholar-interviewers rather than keeping one host. Irregular: the most recent episode we could date, on the Shikoku pilgrimage, was 16 August 2026. Because it follows scholarship rather than an audience, it covers what the rest of this page does not — Korean primary texts, Japanese temple Buddhism, Buddhist history far from the West.
• The Imperfect Buddha Podcast — Matthew O’Connell, since 2015, on the New Books Network since 2021. Long, argumentative conversations that set out, in the show’s own words, to “open up a new space of critique” in contemporary Buddhism. Its 6 July 2026 episode was with Pierce Salguero on meditation-related harm; an earlier 2026 guest was Ronald Purser, of the McMindfulness critique. A page that recommends only warm shows is not being honest with someone about to sit a ten-day retreat.

If you are not Buddhist, and not sure you want to be

• 10% Happier with Dan Harris — secular, very large, about two episodes a week since 2016, and honest about not being a dharma show. Good for a sceptic, useless for learning the four noble truths. It is also the one show here with a paid tier: 10% Happier+ sells ad-free listening and extra guided meditations. See secular mindfulness.
• Secular Buddhism — Noah Rasheta, short solo episodes with full transcripts, past 225 episodes and ten years old as of 2026. The most recent dated episode was 22 July 2026: publishing, though less often than it used to. Explicitly not a lineage — no ordination, no monastics, no rebirth cosmology assumed. Our page on secular Buddhism sets out what that position costs and keeps.
• Buddhability — first-person stories about a concrete problem, a job search or a school year, with the practice in the background; hosted by Cassidy Bradford, weekly, with an episode dated around 18 September 2026. Two honest things at once: this is the only Nichiren show we could verify, and Soka Gakkai — the lay movement behind it, not the whole Nichiren school, which has its own ordained priesthoods — is one of the largest lay Buddhist organisations in the world, though its own 2025 figure of 8.27 million in Japan runs well above the sociologist Levi McLaughlin’s 2018 estimate of between 3.78 and 5 million. It is also SGI-USA outreach: it presents no other tradition, and Soka Gakkai was excommunicated by the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood on 28 November 1991.
• Ven. Pomnyun Sunim’s Dharma Talk — a member of the public asks a real question and a Korean Seon monk answers, briefly and without sentiment; titles run to “I Lost My Dog” and “I Am Addicted to K-dramas & K-movies!”. Produced by Jungto Society, the lay-led Korean community he founded in 1988. The English feed’s most recent episode, “I Want to Regain My Freedom through Baseball”, was dated 18 September 2026, and the five before it alternated Tuesdays and Fridays, with one Tuesday skipped — this is the most reliably live show on the page. See Buddhism in Korea.

Shows from one tradition

Each row was checked on 21 September 2026. A date is the most recent episode we could verify, not a claim about a schedule.

Four of those need more than a row. The Way Out Is In is the one major show here carried by monastics of an Asian lineage, though it is made in France for English listeners: Brother Phap Huu, who attended Thich Nhat Hanh for seventeen years, in conversation with the journalist Jo Confino; Plum Village’s own page for it says the show is co-produced by the Plum Village App and Global Optimism, with support from the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation. Plum Village’s podcast page carries four feeds: this one, Meet the Monastics and Listen, which the community runs, and TNH Audio, which it lists separately. If what you want is Thich Nhat Hanh himself rather than a show about his lineage, go to the last of those. If you would rather see the community than hear it, our guide to Buddhist documentaries and films covers the documentary made inside Plum Village.

BSWA is the largest free single-community dharma feed in English we could verify, and it is not American: Friday-night talks, retreat talks and sutta classes from the Perth monasteries, with Ajahn Brahm giving the 2026 Rains Retreat teachings at Bodhinyana Monastery — a session dated 18 September 2026 — released through the BSWA feed or its companion Deeper Dhamma feed. It is a firehose rather than a curated show, so browse by teacher. This is also the community that went ahead with bhikkhuni ordination in 2009 and was expelled from its parent lineage for it, so its nuns’ talks sit on the same feed as its monks’.

Anukampa matters less for the show than for the fact of it: a bhikkhuni teaching from a project whose aim is the first forest monastery in England where women can train towards full ordination. Most recent dated episode, 28 July 2026.

Pure Land is the empty shelf, and we went looking. Every Jodo Shinshu feed we could find has stopped or slowed: Weekly Wheel, from the Orange County Buddhist Church, last published on 17 February 2025; No Doubt, from Rev. Dr. Takashi Miyaji, on 30 September 2022; the DharmaRealm in 2020. Buddhist Churches of America describes Dial the Dharma as a weekly Wednesday message from Bishop Rev. Marvin Harada — short, and reachable by telephone as well as by feed, for congregants without easy computer access — but publishes no episode dates, so we cannot confirm a cadence. We checked Shin specifically, because that is where the English-language material is; Chinese Jingtu and Vietnamese Tinh Do are no better served in English. Anyone drawn to Pure Land Buddhism is, in podcast terms, badly served.

One thing the other lists will not tell you

Several of the pages that rank for this search still recommend Against the Stream, the organisation and feed attached to Noah Levine. In March 2018 the Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society suspended Levine, its founder, after allegations of sexual misconduct; an independent investigation by the attorney Roberta Yang concluded that he had likely violated the Third Precept of the organisation’s teachers’ code of ethics, “to avoid creating harm through sexuality”. Levine denied the allegations. He was removed from the board and from teaching roles, and the society closed its Los Angeles, Santa Monica and San Francisco centres on 30 September 2018. Both findings were reported by Tricycle.

This matters for one entry above. Josh Korda, whose Dharmapunx NYC talks we recommend, is the guiding teacher of Dharma Punx New York and was a student of Levine’s for seventeen years. Nothing in the paragraph above is an allegation against Korda, and his group runs independently. We say it because the shared name will lead you there in one search, and you should hear it from a page that checked rather than from a comment thread.

We are not telling you what to listen to. We are telling you what the recommendation lists leave out, because a podcast is dozens of hours alone with a voice, and the question of who that voice is belongs at the start rather than the end. The same question is worth asking of any teacher before you give them that much attention — see how to find a Buddhist teacher.

Worth mining, but not live

Labelled, not hidden. All four are worth hearing; none will appear in your feed.

• The Lion’s Roar Podcast — 141 episodes of the magazine’s editors interviewing teachers and scholars. For a live magazine show, go to Tricycle Talks.
• The Spirit Underground — twelve episodes by Spring Washam and Lama Rod Owens, ending 21 November 2024. One of very few Buddhist shows co-hosted by two Black teachers; Washam comes from the insight stream, Owens is an authorised Lama in the Tibetan tradition.
• the DharmaRealm — around a hundred episodes between 2008 and 2020 by Rev. Harry Gyokyo Bridge, a Shin minister in Oakland, and Scott Mitchell, a scholar of Buddhism, on “Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, Buddhism in the modern world, pop-culture, music, sci-fi, and how all those things are related”, in their own denomination’s words.
• Bob Thurman Podcast — an archive running to Ep. 345, from Tibet House US and the Menla retreat centre, by the first American Buddhist monk of the Tibetan tradition, ordained by the Dalai Lama in 1965.

What this field is missing

English-language Buddhist podcasting is overwhelmingly produced in North America, Western Europe and Australia, and comes from either the Western insight stream or Western convert Zen. We looked for counterweights and found real ones — Pomnyun Sunim, Insight Myanmar, Buddhability, Plum Village, Thubten Chodron, BSWA, Anukampa, Dharmabytes. Even so, only one show here is made in Asia for a global audience: Ven. Pomnyun Sunim’s, produced by the lay-led Korean community he founded. The pattern is larger than podcasting: nearly all the English-language media about Buddhism — this page, the books, the documentaries — is made in the West, while the monuments the tradition actually built stand almost entirely in Asia.

Still missing: Chinese and Taiwanese Chan; Japanese temple Buddhism as practised in Japan; Sri Lankan and Thai temple Buddhism in their own languages; Tibetan Buddhism as taught inside Tibetan-speaking communities; a living Shin show. And the largest absence of all: the Ambedkarite Buddhism of India’s Dalit converts, tens of millions of people, reached in English only sidelong through Triratna’s Dharmabytes and not on their own terms at all. As far as we could verify in September 2026, there is no English-language show of their own. That is a fact about the medium, not about Buddhism — see Buddhism in the West.

One warning attaches to the best of those counterweights. Insight Myanmar, launched in 2019, reports from where most Western insight teachers trained; #610, “Critical Condition”, was dated 21 September 2026. Since the February 2021 coup its remit has widened from meditation lineages to Myanmar’s political crisis and humanitarian emergency. It is reporting, not consolation, and a reader looking for calm should not be sent there unprepared. Our page on Buddhism in Myanmar gives the background.

A show is not an archive, and neither is a teacher

Dharma Seed and AudioDharma are archives rather than shows — browsable by teacher and by topic, and both in the insight stream: Dharma Seed’s front page offers “Western Buddhist Vipassana Teachings”, and AudioDharma is the freely given talk archive of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. A third belongs beside them and rarely gets named — TNH Audio, which gathers Thich Nhat Hanh’s own talks and is the reason that “the big dharma archives lean insight” needs a qualifier. How large it is we cannot tell you: its own About page says it “presents over 400 dharma talks, mainly given by Thich Nhat Hanh”, while Plum Village’s podcasts page says the same archive “presents over 4,000 Dharma talks by Thich Nhat Hanh”. Both are reputable and they are a factor of ten apart; we report both and have not been able to reconcile them. It is an independent archive rather than a Plum Village publication, though Plum Village lists it on its own podcast page. All three are covered on our guide to Buddhist apps and online resources, which gives the same two figures and the same caveat, along with the question of whether wellness apps are Buddhist at all. This page is about shows — a host, a format, a feed — and several teachers here are archived there too.

Pair a feed with one good book. And if the listening starts to feel like a substitute rather than a support, notice what a recording cannot do: it cannot see your practice. A sangha can, and so can a teacher. If the listening makes you want to sit with other people, a Buddhist retreat is the usual next step.