Taoism and Western Culture

Overview

Taoism, although its origins lie in Ancient China, has a far ranging global influence even to this day. Laozi offered inexhaustible truth for everything on earth in just 5,000 words. Taoism also enjoys equal popularity with the bible. On this course we’ll explore exactly how Taoism is being applied in today’s world.

Understand Taoism across the world

As Taoism has spread it’s been interpreted in many different ways. We’ll have a look at how European and Western cultures are using and applying the various beliefs of Taoism. Plus we’ll learn more about one of the key texts about Taoism: Lao Zi, the Chinese cultural epic.

Learn about Taoism in a variety of ways

Throughout the course you’ll learn about Taoism through vivid and interesting examples and different types of media helping you to explore Taoism fully.

Explore how to apply Taoism

In a hectic modern world full of distraction applying Taoism might seem difficult. This course will offer you some hints and tips on how to apply Taoism in modern society and benefit from the truth Taoism has to offer.

There are no special requirements for this course but an enthusiasm for discovering new ways of thinking might be useful.

Reviews

1.3 rating, based on 3 Class Central reviews

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Hilary Neilson

This should have been a fascinating course, and it did have fascinating moments, mainly provided by its stimulus to extra reading or the contributions of other students. I believe this was the first time the course had been offered, however, unfortu…

This should have been a fascinating course, and it did have fascinating moments, mainly provided by its stimulus to extra reading or the contributions of other students. I believe this was the first time the course had been offered, however, unfortunately, it betrayed the self-promotional intent of the providing institute. Some lecturers were strangely and almost rudely biased against western rational approaches, rather than balancing the benefits of both western and Chinese systems of knowledge, or providing more information about Daoism in China. Maybe I should have read the title more carefully, 'Taoism and Western Culture' - emphasis is indeed on 'western'. If you want to learn about Daoism, or study the DaoDeJing this is not the course for you, since there was rather little information about Daoism itself. If, however, you can be broadminded enough to overlook the oddities of the presentation, you will certainly learn some fascinating things on a tangent.
Anonymous

I've done 10 FutureLearn courses and enjoyed 9 of them. This is the odd one out. Maybe that's unfair, because it's so awful it's almost enjoyable. Many people dropped out. It seems to have been put together sloppily by a mixture of postModernist postTruth egocentric lecturers and a very small team of two Hosts and a mentor. The mentor at first operated in secrecy, and later all three of them disappeared (in shame?). No assessment at all. Very little feedback. Not much about Taoism. Awful transcripts. There were some interesting threads of student discussion, but it was as if the teacher had left the classroom.
Don't waste your time on this.
Tonolmo @tonolmo

Understand Taoism across the world

Learn about Taoism in a variety of ways

Explore how to apply Taoism

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