Seth Zuihō Segall - Buddhism and Human Flourishing: A Modern Western Perspective

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

If we modern Westerners are to make Buddhism our own, we must find ways to accommodate traditional Buddhist ideas to the preexisting understandingsboth tacit and explicitthat 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.

The central thesis of this book is that the tensions between traditional Buddhist understandings of enlightenment and prevailing Western notions of human flourishing are significant contributing factors in the evolution of Western Buddhism. I intend to show how this underlying tension strongly affects the way many, if not most, contemporary Western Buddhist teachers and practitioners interpret the Dharma.

There are, by now, many excellent works of scholarship that explain how and why Western Buddhist modernism came to be as it is. The works of Donald Lopez Jr ., David McMahan , Thanissaro Bhikkhu , and Ann Gleig come readily to mind. Their work has traced the general influences of Western science, psychology, economics, literature, and technological innovation and the specific influences of Western individualism, romanticism , transcendentalism , perennialism, humanistic psychology, and social liberation movements on Western Buddhist modernism. Meanwhile, the influence of prevailing Western notions of human flourishing, derived from the Aristotelian tradition, has gone practically unnoticed, hiding in plain sight. This book is an attempt to remedy that relative neglect.

The idea for this book came to me two years ago during a weeklong Zensesshin (silent Buddhist meditation retreat). One isnt supposed to nurture thoughts duringsesshin if thoughts like these occur, one is just supposed to let them go. I was helpless in the face of this particular onslaught, however. The least I could do was to turn it into a book.

Although the idea came sudden, unbidden, and whole, its seeds had been planted long before. In February 2006 I heard Tibetan Buddhist scholar-practitioner B. Alan Wallace suggest that Aristotle and the Buddha shared parallel conceptions of the unity of happiness , wisdom , and morality. Five years later I heard philosopher Damien Keown argue that traditional Buddhist ethics was a form of Aristotelian virtue ethics. In 2011 I read philosopher Owen Flanagans discussion of Buddhist and Aristotelian subtypes of happiness in his bookThe Bodhisattvas Brain. Between 2012 and 2017 I taught an undergraduate psychology course examining well-being in Aristotle , Western psychology, and Buddhism, and sometime early in those years re-read Aristotles