Once I’d solved this problem for Christianity, I went looking for the same thing on Buddhism and hit an almost identical wall. Buddhism is one of the most flattened traditions in secondary education — reduced to meditation and mindfulness, stripped of its history, politics, and internal arguments. What I found was either devotional material aimed at practitioners or a dry survey of doctrine frozen in the fifth century BCE. Nothing treated it as a tradition still making choices under pressure, which is exactly what the IB curriculum asks students to analyze.
See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $10.99
A 23-page guide built around change as the organizing concept, with two case studies — the Mahayana expansion and bodhisattva doctrine, and Buddhist modernism’s engagement with Western science and colonial pressure. That second case study is the one that does the real work: students see a tradition actively negotiating with outside pressure rather than simply absorbing it, which is the analytical frame the IB actually rewards.
If you’ve hit the same wall on this one that I hit on Christianity — nothing built for a classroom instead of a meditation retreat or a textbook footnote — this is what filled the gap.
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