Online: Buddhism and Human Flourishing
with Seth Zuihō Segall
Thursdays, July 7th – 28th, 2022 | 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET
If we modern Westerners are to make Buddhism our own, we must find ways to accommodate traditional Buddhist ideas to the preexisting understandings—both tacit and explicit—that constitute our modern way of being-in-the-world. To do anything less puts us at risk for an inner dividedness in which we half-believe in any number of contrasting and incompatible ideas. This is not a good place to end up.
This course is about the tension between Buddhist and Western conceptions of what it means to live the best possible kind of life one can aspire to. It’s a course about what aspects of traditional Buddhist teachings are possible for us, as modern Westerners, to truly accept and make good use of, and what aspects conflict so deeply with our cultural heritage that genuine belief becomes impossible. By genuine belief, I mean the kind of belief we feel deeply in our bones in the same way we believe gravity will keep us rooted to the ground and that we will not, someday, wake up to find ourselves floating mysteriously in midair.
Lastly, this is a course about how Buddhism is changing during the course of its transmission to the West and how it will continue to evolve to remain relevant to how we—as modern people—understand and construct our lives.
The topics covered in this course include 1) the rules governing the evolution of religions in general, with a focus on Buddhism’s evolution over time in India, China, Japan, and the West, 2) the chief incompatibilities between traditional Asian forms of Buddhism and modern Western cultural assumptions, 3) Theravada and Mahayana concepts of Enlightenment as viewed from a modern Western perspective, 4) synthesizing Aristotle’s idea of human flourishing and Buddhist ideas about enlightenment to arrive at a concept of eudaimonic enlightenment, and 5) reconsidering traditional Buddhist ideas concerning desire, aversion, attachment, suffering, self and self-transcendence, and the ethical precepts from a eudaimonic enlightenment perspective.
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