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.
Registration:
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Registration Fees include Teacher Support
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Teacher(s)
Seth Zuihō Segall
Seth Zuihō Segall, Ph.D. was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in the White Plum Asanga and Zen Peacemaker Order lineages by Daiken Nelson Roshi and is affiliated with Pamsula Zen of Westchester. Before studying Zen, he was an Insight Meditation practitioner. He is a retired clinical psychologist who was formally Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, Director of Psychology at Waterbury Hospital, and president of the New England Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.
Seth’s publications include Encountering Buddhism: Western Psychology and Buddhist Teachings (SUNY Press, 2003), Buddhism and Human Flourishing: A Modern Western Perspective (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), Living Zen: A Practical Guide to a Peaceful, Positive, and Balanced Life (Rockridge Press, 2020), and The House We Live in: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism (Equinox, 2023), as well as chapters in The Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (2022) and the Springer Handbook of Positive Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (2022). He is a contributing editor for Tricycle Magazine and the science writer for the Mindfulness Research Monthly. His work focuses on integrating Asian and Western approaches to human flourishing within a naturalistic, pragmatic framework.