Online Certificate in Asian Religions and Healing

The Online Certificate in Asian Religions and Healing is an exciting offering that will expand and deepen the student's understanding of the roots and applications of asian healing traditions.

Boston University's Professor Livia Kohn has design this four course series specifically for the online audience. Through the four required courses students will gain knowledge of asian religions and their approach to body cultivation, meditation, and death and dying issues.

All four courses are taught by Livia Kohn. They integrate academic knowledge with practical experience and can be taken either individually or as a series to earn a graduate certificate. Students work through online lectures, watch videos clips, follow audio instructions, and read textbooks and web sites as asked. They complete two short weekly assignments, post discussions, meet in chat-rooms, and prepare a term paper on a topic of their choice.

Professor Kohn has taught Asian religions for over twenty years and has published numerous books on Daoism, meditation, and healing.

Synopsis of Courses

STH TT 751: Health and Wholeness in Asian Religions (Sept -Oct)
Asian religions have increasingly become part of our life, and numerous practitioners, both immigrant and Western, are actively engaged in them today. In this course we examine Asian religions in their theoretical and practical dimensions, focusing especially on their visions and methods regarding physical health and spiritual wholeness. Over seven weeks we look at the history, sacred texts, concepts, and contemporary practices of five Asian religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto. In each case we strive to understand how followers under-stand the human condition and how they hope to transform and/or transcend it.

STH TT 752: Body Cultivation (Nov - Dec)
Asian religions have a long history of anchoring spiritual growth in the transformation of the body, which they see in a radically different way from Western understanding: as a network of energy centers and flowing channels, of multiple-layered sheaths and divine residences. They have accordingly developed a plethora of cultivation methods that involve the major ways of absorbing and releasing energy in the body: through food, breath, physical movement, and sexual interaction. In this class we learn about the body geography of traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, then study the body cultivation practices of Yoga and Daoism, in all cases relating the practical methods to traditional cosmology and Western scientific understanding.

STH TT 753: Meditation (Jan - Feb)
Meditation is a method of mental focus that suspends critical thinking and creates deep concentration, receptive mindfulness, bodily awareness, and creative visualization for the purpose of finding a deeper truth within oneself and/or discovering the ultimate reality of the universe. It has positive effects on emotions and physiology and can be used for healing as well as for religious salvation. In our study, we begin by looking at the fundamental definitions, social setting, and common aspects of meditation. Then we examine six specific forms: Yoga, Mantra, Insight, Zen, Tantra, and Daoist inner alchemy. We come to understand how each of these accesses the subconscious mind in its specific way, connects to a different Asian tradition, and has its unique religious goals and soteriological concepts.

STH TT 754: Death and the Afterlife (March-April)
Death is an inescapable fact of life, and all religious traditions attempt to come to grips with it. This course examines death in light of the ways people, and especially the followers of Asian religions, have attempted to accept, deny, defeat, or transcend it. In this class, we begin with an initial discussion on understanding attitudes toward death, the process of dying, right-to-die is-sues, funerals, mourning, and grief. Then we look at afterlife concepts in terms of four models: materialism, the eternal soul, spiritism, and reincarnation. We conclude with an examination of immortality in theory, practice, and fiction.

For more details contact Professor Livia Kohn.

For application and registaration information contact the admissions office.