He became a professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972, and founding director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center there in 1987.
He was president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy from 1982 to 1985, and chair of the American Academy of Religion from 1993 to 1999.
[3] In 2018, a volume of essays in Larson's honour, Theory and Practice of Yoga, was published by Brill.
[4] In that volume, among many other tokens of respect, Jeffrey S. Lidkey described Larson's "extraordinary grasp of the textual sources on yogic practice and philosophy".
[5] Reviewing Yoga: India's Philosophy of Meditation edited by Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, Stuart Ray Sarbacker comments that the "landmark" volume forms a "long-awaited sequel" to their Samkhya: A Dualist Tradition, and among the most important books on the subject in half a century, as in Sarbacker's view it "represents the culmination of the trajectory of Larson's engagement with the material over the course of his prolific career.