Kurt Kankan Spellmeyer

Infobox Buddhist biography
name = Kurt Kankan Spellmeyer


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dharma_name = Kankan (Ch. Guan Han)
birth_date = 1953
birth_place = United States
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denomination =Zen Buddhism
school =Rinzai
lineage = Cold Mountain Sangha
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website = [http://zazen.rutgers.edu/ Cold Mountain Sangha]
Kurt Spellmeyer is a Zen teacher and professor in the English Department [http://english.rutgers.edu/] at Rutgers University.

Zen Lineage

Kurt Spellmeyer, Kankan Sensei, 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 Sensei has practiced Zen meditation for 32 years. He has directed the Cold Mountain Sangha [http://zazen.rutgers.edu] 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.

Cold Mountain Sangha: Locations

Kankan Sensei leads meditation groups at several locations (New Brunswick, Piscataway, Princeton, Blairstown, Cranford, Lanoka Harbor and Lebanon) all over the state of New Jersey [http://zazen.rutgers.edu/schedule/index.html] . He leads five 5 to 7 days long sesshins every year.

Scholar, Author and Teacher

Professor Spellmeyer is a respected teacher and scholar 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 (with Richard Miller; 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.