Guest Lecture: From Agnostic to Atheist to Secular Buddhist: A Personal Journey

[photo credit: Photo by Johnson Wang on Unsplash]

Speaker: Stephen Batchelor (Bodhi College)

Date: Thursday, February 20, 2020, 1:30 pm–3:00 pm

Venue: Yale University, Linsley-Chittenden Hall, Room 102, 63 High Street, New Haven, CT 06511


The most outspoken proponent of secular Buddhism, Stephen Batchelor, is a scholar and teacher who has written more than twenty books on Buddhism. Born in 1953, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk at the age of twenty and spent ten years training in the Tibetan Geluk and Korean Buddhist Zen orders. In 2015, he co-founded Bodhi College, a European educational project dedicated to the understanding and application of early Buddhism. Some of his influential publications include Buddhism Without BeliefsConfession of a Buddhist AtheistAfter Buddhism, and Secular Buddhism. His new book The Art of Solitude will be published by Yale University Press in February 2020. He travels worldwide to lecture and currently lives in southwest France. In this talk, he will share the story of his decades-long spiritual journey that led him to envision a secular form of Buddhism.

     

Sponsored by the Yale Council on East Asian Studies and Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies.

[Original event posting]