Kurt Kankan Spellmeyer

Kurt Spellmeyer is a Zen teacher and professor in the English Department at Rutgers University.

Zen Lineage

Kurt Spellmeyer, Kankan Roshi, Trained with Takabayashi Genki and Kangan Glenn Webb, founders of the Seattle Zen Center. In 1985, Spellmeyer completed his training under Webb Roshi and was authorized to teach. He received the dharma name Kankan (Ch. Guan Han, “Sees the Cold”), at a private ceremony with Webb in 1991.

Kankan Roshi has practiced Zen meditation for 38 years. He has directed the Cold Mountain Sangha since 1994, and supports himself by working as a professor in the English Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Cold Mountain (Kanzan) lineage of Rinzai Zen can be traced back to the Han Shan Temple in Suzhou, China.

Scholar, Author, and Teacher

Professor Spellmeyer is a teacher in the English department at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the author of Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century (SUNY Press, 2003), The New Humanities Reader ( Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), and Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition (Prentice Hall, 1992), as well as articles on the theory of composition, critical theory of composition, critical theory, and academic institutions.

He also serves as the Director of the Writing Program at Rutgers University and has revitalized the teaching of introductory and advanced writing courses, ).

His latest book is Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction (Wisdom Publications, 2010 ) .

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