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by SBN Editor

Bodhi College is offering an online course, After Buddhism and beyond, that will include a comprehensive series of lectures, reflections, and discussions on the theme of Secular Dharma. The course will be taught by Stephen Batchelor and begin January 2021.

Secular Dharma is a way of radically reconfiguring the dharma to address the conditions of modernity and the crises facing the survival of life on earth. It is founded on an ethics of uncertainty, which seeks an appropriate response to the suffering of our times without any appeal to metaphysical or religious beliefs.

Course Content:

Semester One: Based on selected passages from his book After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, Stephen will consider the emergence of Secular Dharma within the history of Buddhism, offer a humanistic account of Gotama, the Buddha, and examine the key ideas that inform a skeptical, agnostic, therapeutic and pragmatic understanding of Gotama’s teachings.

Semester Two: In preparation for these sessions, participants will be sent passages from Stephen’s work-in-progress, provisionally titled The Ethics of Uncertainty: A Post-Buddhist Odyssey. During this semester, Stephen will explore how the project of imagining a Secular Dharma is evolving as a practical philosophy to engage with the existential crises of our time.

Each session will include talks, breakout groups, short meditations, and a question and answer period with the entire group.

Participants are invited to join home groups, which we suggest meet at 18:00 local time on Tuesdays between the sessions of each semester, to continue their explorations of the topics introduced in the course (unless the group itself decides a different meeting time). The home groups will be formed of students in the same time zones. We will also try to create groups according to different languages.

A reading list and links to relevant audio and video recordings will be provided.

Each seminar will be recorded and made available for participants as soon as possible after the event.

A public launch of After Buddhism and Beyond, hosted by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, will take place at the end of January 2021 (time and date to be confirmed). Stephen Batchelor will discuss the seminar series in dialogue with Tricycle editor James Shaheen.

For more information and to register, click here.