Leisure Studies, the Happiness Movement, and
Japanese Zen
This article very briefly illuminates the roots of leisure theory in the
Western hemisphere, seeking common threads with a number of sources
including Buddhist philosophy, especially referring to Zen. It devotes some time
to discussing the multiple meanings of leisure in the academic setting. Finally, it
fetches up with contemporary discourse circulating around Positive Psychology
informing today’s so-called “Happiness Movement.”
Based on its reliance on a pantheon of Greek philosophers including
Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, academic Leisure Studies is often considered to
have a fundamentally Eurocentric bias. Now, Aristotle has renewed relevance
because of the emergence over the last one or two decades of the “Happiness
Movement” under the aegis of Positive Psychology. Framing this discourse, and
providing a kind of triangulation, is the continuing exploration of Eastern
wisdom—certainly including Buddhism which entered the West in great waves
from India, but also especially Japanese Zen.
According to Aristotle, a life of “virtue” leads to what is often called
“happiness,” meaning by that eudaimonia—usually roughly translated as
“happiness” yet maybe somewhat less imbued with hedonic immediacy and
more with personal satisfaction then our quotidian usage. Apparently, much of
the emphasis in today’s Positive Psychology is a call for a species of happiness,
if we are to summarize from the coverage in The Chronicle Review of the
Association’s meeting with more “than 1,500 people from 52 countries [who]
came to listen” (Ruark, 2009).
According to the Review's Jennifer Ruark, “they packed the ballroom of the
Philadelphia Sheraton for the keynote speakers, Martin E.P. Seligman and Philip
G. Zimbardo, whose talks were projected onto four giant video screens. They
filled the aisles for a lecture by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, until hotel security
arrived to dislodge them” (Ruark, 2009). The reporter goes on to explain that “in
the past decade, positive-psychology [sic] research has drawn hundreds of
millions of dollars in grants. Studies of emotional well-being and its many
facets, once next to impossible to find, are now routinely presented at meetings
of the Association for Psychological Science and published in the discipline’s
leading journals. Dozens of colleges offer courses in positive psychology . . . ”
(Ruark, 2009). While activity in academic Leisure Studies may have crested in
the last third of the last century, many such scholarly departments broadening
their orbits into sport and F