Luke Gibson has been teaching Sanskrit for over a decade. For much of that time, he taught at the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts (法鼓文理學院) in Taiwan, offering both introductory and intermediate reading courses, alongside workshops on translation and recitation. With a background in French, Mandarin, Classical Chinese, and Pāli as well as Sanskrit, his passion for language learning and pedagogy inspired him to develop his own Sanskrit textbook, refined over five years in his classroom, and launch the Śabda·vidyā Sanskrit Studio (Chinese: 聲明梵語學苑), an online platform designed to share his passion with a diverse global audience of Chinese- and English-speaking Sanskrit enthusiasts. 

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As a relatively young teacher, Luke Gibson retains a vivid memory of what it felt like to be a beginner—grappling with unfamiliar sentence structures and puzzling over expressions that seemed entirely foreign. That experience continues to shape his approach to teaching and underpins the design of Reading Sanskrit, which is based on the conviction that learning to read Sanskrit fluently is not as difficult as often assumed—so long as students are guided from the very beginning to understand how the language truly works, including sentence structure, distinctive features of Sanskrit style or usage, compound formation, and idiomatic expressions.

 

Alongside his work in language teaching, his interests include early Buddhist (Pāli) literature, Mahāyāna philosophy, Advaita Vedānta, and classical Sanskrit poetry (kāvya). He is also drawn to the question of the transmission and adaptation of South Asian traditions beyond the subcontinent—most notably in East Asia, through Chan/Zen Buddhism, and in the West, as seen in modern yoga, the mindfulness movement, Neo-Vedānta, or “Buddhist modernism.”