True Beginner's Mind

What happens when 21 university students encounter the teachings and practices of Zen for the first time? Most writings on Zen have come from Zen masters, scholars, and experienced practitioners. Here, a cross-section of American students with no prior experience of Zen, engage in meditation practice, contemporary Zen texts, and in-class inquiry, documenting their emerging understandings, challenges, doubts, and questions over the course of a fifteen-week semester in a course titled...
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What happens when 21 university students encounter the teachings and practices of Zen for the first time? Most writings on Zen have come from Zen masters, scholars, and experienced practitioners. Here, a cross-section of American students with no prior experience of Zen, engage in meditation practice, contemporary Zen texts, and in-class inquiry, documenting their emerging understandings, challenges, doubts, and questions over the course of a fifteen-week semester in a course titled Non-argumentative rhetoric in Zen. This course, taught in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas, focused on the unique rhetoric of Zen teachings in the context of meditative practice: contradiction, negation, silence, story, surprise, gesture, technical vocabulary. Students kept Learning Records throughout the semester, and developed these chapters as an ongoing record of their experiences. Despite the common framework of texts, meditation practice, and class discussion, each chapter is a unique and fresh account of this work.