Outstanding course. I had been meditating for a year prior to taking this course and was just beginning to see the long-term benefits of the practice. I am not a spiritual person. My interest in religion goes only as far as it's impact on culture and society. I have been pursuing Buddhist philosophy and practice to the extent that it has shown substantive scientific benefits. I was really getting interested in the intersecting links between Buddhist thought and practice and the underlying science behind the results when this course came along. It was everything I hoped it would be. The material was relevant and thought - provoking and Professor Wright did an amazing job with its presentation.

I got a lot out of this course. While the curriculum was by necessity very condensed, I thought that Dr. Wright did an impressive job of organizing the progression of concepts and including key information. The interviews he conducted with guest speakers in each of the lectures were helpful, and relevant to the topics being discussed. I also appreciated the supplementary reading materials included with each week's lesson. Most of all, I enjoyed Dr. Wright, who has a very relaxed, common sensical approach to what he's discussing. I would recommend this class to anyone who has interest in the topic and also to anyone who wants to learn from a very knowledgeable and effective teacher.

For me, this course is incredibly useful because it helped me build the basic skills of understanding myself and the world around us.

A really interesting course for those who are looking for a view of Buddhism and Science converging together.

Highly recommended.

Very insightful and great intro to Buddhism and psychology. Liked the way the course was formed and the whole platform for it.

Excellent course. Deep insights are presented in a brilliant way by Prof Wright.

Amazing course. Would recommend to everyone. This is what MOOCs are meant to be!

Buddhism and Modern Psychology takes to an existential and inspiring adventure.

Great teacher and awesome course, every module is very interesting

I suggest giving a better order to the structure of the course

Amazing videos and knowledge full

Budhdham sharnam Gachchami

The best psychological view of Buddhism I've ever seen

Excellent, quick course with a great professor!

wonderful!

The course is well articulated, subject are interesting and the forefront of the research between eastern practices and western discoveries. It teaches me many things and make me reflect on important buddhist topics.

But what about the way of teaching? Sorry to say that it doesn't make use of the opportunities of the audiovideo media. It has been quite hard for me to reach the end of the course even though I think to be a motivated pupil.

Very very introductory. This course explores the Buddhist theory of suffering and liberation by comparing it to evolutionary psychological theories.

It is not a deep course on Buddhism - it lacks any substantive discussion of differences between Buddhist schools, of the difficulty of reconstructing the "historical" Buddha (a problem as difficult as reconstructing the "historical Christ"), of the fact that Buddhism as popularized in the West is actually quite different from any of the Asian forms of Buddhism, etc.

Also, evolutionary psychology is controversial in its own right - one criticism of it is that it creates "just-so" stories about the origins of mental processes that are impossible to verify (or falsify). These objections are well known, but are not confronted in the course.

A scholarly much sounder and deeper course is the one on Tibetan Buddhism from University of Virginia. It suffers from truly appalling presentation (the video lectures are some of the most boring I have ever watched), but the diversity of angles from which Buddhism is examined, and the depth of content are really outstanding.

按时完成了课程，分数也及格了，没拿到证书，心里很难过

An absolute gem! Professor really presents the right breadth and depth required whether you are new to Buddhism, experienced Buddhist practitioner or someone who just want to know the Buddhism and its correspondence with Modern psychology (or someone who just want to analyse and review validity either/or/both Buddhism and Modern psychology for themselves). Professional also makes exceptional effort to interview some of the most important names in Modern psychology and Buddhism researches to interpret scriptures and shares their empirical experiences.

I must admin, the first 2 weeks was a little tedious for me as those are concepts that I am quite familiar with and that on a practical level, it was introducing fundamental Buddhism concepts, its scholastic interpretations and the importance of experiential aspect of meditation, all of those I was both familiar with (on an experiential level) and contains an academic depth that was not exactly required by me.

But from week 3 onwards that's where things get SUPER interesting and fascinating. Professor start debunking different interpretations of the "No-self" notion taught by Buddhism's 2nd sermon. This is an aspect of Buddhism that I always had difficulty accepting its mainstream interpretation and voila - the 3 parts lecture really clears all the mist for good. Office hour provides further doubt clearing and discussions forums are active and bustling with students with all arrays of discussions!

A completely random sidenote: This course provides a bonus perks for dog lover from week 2 office hours onwards... :D

I have just completed this course. This is my first attempt to understand Buddhism and have approached this with all the biases inherent in having lived my whole life as a Westerner who has spent very little time trying to understand mysticism or meditation. The abstract concepts of Buddhist thought stretched my mind greatly and at times I had to stop the video just to reflect on some concept so abstract I had to play segments of the video lecture over and over again. Dr Wright seems to labor greatly on getting his explanations as plain and straightforward as he could. He held my attention without gimmicks and if I didn't get the point the first time, the video playback format made it possible for me to go over one point or another as I needed. If you come with all the usual Western bias and baggage toward Eastern (in this case Buddhist) concept and thought and would like to learn. This is the place to start. You won't be disappointed.

This is a good course on the intersection of Buddhist ideas and modern science (specifically evolutionary psychology and cognitive sciences). Professor Wright has managed to make a very cohesive course; the topics that are covered flow and progress in a very nice way, the back-and-forth between religious and scientific ideas goes smoothly, and the course doesn’t try to cover too many topics given its length. Wright manages to bring up philosophical ideas and theories associated with scientific discoveries in a thought-provoking way — he doesn’t tell you what to think as much as he guides you through different ideas and counter-ideas. This is helped by the weekly office hours, were Wright reflects on the past week and brings up points brought up by students. I’ve appreciated Wright’s obvious humble and reflective attitude towards the subject.

I was inspired to take Robert Wright's course Buddhism and Modern Psychology after reading the book he researched and wrote while teaching this course, with the provocative title Why Buddhism is True. I've read Wright's previous books The Moral Animal, NonZero and The Evolution of God. Wright's academic interests lie at the intersection between Darwinian evolutionary psychology, religion and moral philosophy. This course and his latest book offer convincing arguments for why scientific evidence supports both the Buddhist diagnosis of the "human predicament" and its prescriptions for coping with, if not exactly overcoming, the inevitable dissatisfaction and displeasure that we all experience. I highly recommend the course to anyone interested in this particular perspective and especially to the religious skeptics and empiricists out there.

I loved Prof. Wrights´ lectures and will miss watching his videos! His course content was well paced, and the structure of the topics, as they built onto each other, helped retain the material. I in particular liked his humour, and humility, as well as his playfulness with his dogs. I found the additional reading resources rather overwhelming and the time estimates for completion rather optimistic too. Having said that, I was able to answer the essay questions easily based on the course content only, was thus not penalized by only skimming some of the additional reading material resources. On another note, a certificate of completion for this course would also be amazing, just to hang on my wall and show off. Thank you Prof. Wright, and I look forward to hearing more from you on some of the websites you referenced. Best wishes, Beatrice

The content of the course is accessible for those newer to the study of Buddhism or psychology, at the same time offering new and intriguing ideas and resources for folks like myself who have some experience in both studies. Dr. Wright does a brilliant job of guiding the student through the materials using interview videos with experts from across disciplines. If any changes were to be made to this course, I would suggest incorporating other kinds of videos and adding a reference list of all the research referenced during the course (providing the research would be especially awesome - the Science of Happiness course does a brilliant job of this). Many thanks for the opportunity to learn from and dialogue with Dr. Wright and all his accomplished and interesting guests.

For the past 1-1/2 years, I take a weekly class on mindfulness meditation and try to practice it everyday. I have found that this course is the right course for me to take at my beginning stage to learn about Buddhism. The course has prompted me to study Buddhism even more deeply. The professor is excellent. He is very knowledgeable and does a good job of presenting very important Buddhist ideas and the modern scientific research to verify them. The only constructive criticism I have is that for some people, it might be better to read rather than to listen to his lectures. Maybe it's because I am more of a visual rather than an aural person. In any case, I heartily recommend this course if you are interested in a good introduction to Buddhism.

This was an incredibly well-structured, understandable and deeply fulfilling MOOC. Professor Wright manages to keep a professional, clear and friendly tone throughout the whole course, brilliantly interweaving naturalistic Buddhism with some of the latest theories in Modern Psychology and manages to make a very convincing and alluring connection between the human mind and Buddhist thought about the human predicament and everything that spins around it. I didn't think it was possible to do until I took this course. Spirituality, Science & Religion interconnected in a profound, interesting and captivating hypothesis. I would highly recommend for anyone interested in learning about the human mind and also achieving some peace of mind along the way!