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Writing under the Bodhi tree.

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Abstract

Buddhist Philosophy provides a fitting set of guidelines for writing center pedagogy and inspiration. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's "Charter of Interbeing" supports the importance of rhetoric, kairos and audience consideration, in general. Also, it provides a model, through its concept of "sangha" (community), for a writing center environment conducive to student support. Hanh's "Charter" provides a holistic foundation for novice and veteran writing consultants on which all theories and practices of writing tutorials can rest.

There have been many theories of peer writing assistance that attempt to give us the proper outlook on how to conceptualize and actualize a writing center session. What's more, many of these theories provide imperatives that every writing consultant should know before entering a writing center. However, these theories only provide part of the overall ideology necessary to promote the utmost productivity in a writing center setting. In addition, these fractions of the theoretical tutoring experience have been relayed in ways unnecessarily dense for undergraduate writing consultants trying to simultaneously assuage the anxiety of tutoring and provide the best service for their student writers. We are in need of a more comprehensive, yet accessible, theory.

Ironically, I've found such a theory while taking a break from writing center research and pedagogy. Even stranger, this theory is couched in the fundamentals of Buddhist philosophy. One day, while indulging the leisure-reader in me, I picked up Thich Nhat Hanh's Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism. However, it wasn't long before I noticed something that resonated with the writing center director in me. This innocent looking book, written by a Buddhist monk that I'd taken interest in out of pure curiosity, had provided the comprehensive theory every student writing consultant should read before stepping into a writing center. Thich Nhat Hanh's "Charter of Interbeing" is the perfect credo for writing center theory and practice.

I must begin by saying that I am not trying to promote a new ideology; I believe writing center consultants, in their anxiety, can become too dependent on such things. What's more, if relied on too much, what first may have seemed liberating and flesh can easily become restricting and stale. The fairly recent development of post-process theory, "the body of theory which argues that writing does not always occur in the orderly stages presented by writing process theory", warns writing consultants and writing center administrators not to "adhere too strictly to a formula of non-directive tutoring" (Braun 10). D. Diane Davis, in her book Breaking Up [At] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter, writes,

Any assumption of a "social essence" functions to deny both the infinite finitude (the unprecedented multiplicity) of singular beings and the radical differences among those singular beings. Even when it is downsized to the level of a "discourse community," as Faigley has observed, the myths of common-being serve to "suppress differences among members and exclude those who are labeled different" (231). Proponents of expressionist, feminist, and social epistemic rhetorics of composing typically deal with this problem by turning the pedagogical task toward myth re-vision/reproduction. But, while reinscriptions are certainly not nothing (they are necessary), they also will not have been enough to effect a rigorous hesitation in the machinations of exclusion. (13)

However, we are human and need something on which to hold. We have to have some grounding (most of us do, anyway). We have to have something on which to look back, or at least glance back, for some security. Thus, we arrive at Thich Nhat Hanh's "Charter of Interbeing," which, paralogically, provides a theory that shuns theory. It's time we looked at this mysterious charter as well as...

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